Yearly Archives: 2016

This is a greener General Electric Peterborough

There was a time when the machine was everything in industry, and everything was designed around the machine.

Not today. The machine is one piece in a process and everything about the process is important.

That focus on the entire work environment – and its effect on the natural environment – is evident during a tour of GE Canada’s venerable Park St. plant.

Raul Ceron, the plant quality and process improvement leader, leads the way to Building 16 and a bank of ovens where huge stators are baked to harden their coating. A stator is the stationary section of a motor. The 20-foot-tall ovens can accommodate a 30-tonne stator.

Russell Nash, the advanced manufacturing engineering leader, says the new, largest ovens were installed during Project Caribou, a comprehensive overhaul that began three years ago.

“These other ovens were retrofitted with RTO, regenerative thermal oxidizers, and we were able to get some incentives from Enbridge Gas on that,” Nash explains. “Essentially what it does, the heat that you are generating in the oven goes through an oxidizer and that subsequently reclaims the heat and it goes back into the oven.”

Carbon filters added to the top of the emission stacks mean they also burn cleaner, reducing their environmental impact.

Enbridge is also a player in week-long “eco-treasure hunts.” Hunt teams includes specialists from other parts of the GE operation as well as suppliers such as Enbridge and Peterborough Utilities Inc. They look for ways to improve environmental efficiency.

Projects identified during a hunt are followed up on, “then we come back in a few years and do another one,” Nash says.

Involving suppliers is key, he says, “because things are always changing, things are always improving. So they are coming to us with different ideas, different ways of doing things, different products that we can use.”

Project Caribou had a larger scope. The $26-million investment involved tearing down 300,000 square feet of old, unused building space – equivalent to 60 football fields – and redesigning other buildings.

Building 16 is still vast, with 30,000 sq. ft., of floor space, but the main workspace ceiling was lowered to 20 feet. Towering skylights in the peaked roof remain, providing natural light that employees asked for. All surfaces are white and the space feels very modern.

A single steam boiler system that served the entire plant is also gone.

“Now we have distributed heating systems. We have high intensity, low intensity radiant heaters and we have two smaller boilers,” Ceron says.

The project reduced energy use by 15%, an annual saving of 45 million BTUs. Scrapping the old steam heat system cut water consumption by 60%.

Consolidation also brought more efficiency to the work process. Stators, for example, are now built and baked in the same building.

“Imagine moving 30 tonnes of weight on a transfer cart between buildings during the snow time,” says Ceron. “I mean, it was a lot of movement and a risk to quality.”

Moving heavy machinery also involved injury risk for workers and made a lot of noise.

“We reduced the amount of noise, externally to our neighbours, with not having to transfer equipment back and forth,” says Steve Masciangelo, environmental health and safety manager.

“Removing the buildings helped us with the noise as well, so around the facility it’s quieter.”

The improvements save money and make the plant greener, both part of GE’s vision for a competitive future, says Rahim Ladha, GE Canada’s communications director.

“Our customers are looking at that sort of thing as well. Increasingly it’s becoming part of their evaluation of their supply chain, their attention to environmental performance and their footprint.”

Ceron, who transferred to Peterborough from a GE operation in Monterrey, Mexico three years ago, hopes the improvements bring new work to the plant.

“There are opportunities … but we don’t know it yet. We are working with the global team.”

Once thought to be in survival mode, GE Peterborough is now on a global treasure hunt, dressed in green and looking for jobs.

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner. By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, May 7, 2016.

Tourism goes green at Elmhirst’s Resort

KEENE – Describe something as organic and what comes to mind is chemical free or “all natural.”

Our fascination with natural versus bio-engineered has obscured an older meaning of organic: something that has developed as part of a natural course of events.

Elmhirst’s Resort is organic in both senses.

Across the course of five generations a family farm developed into a thriving hospitality business that wraps together the farm, a resort and conference centre and the Rice Lake shoreline.

Greg Elmhirst, the current general manager, easily reels off the farm and family history. It begins with his great-great-grandfather, a farm and some cottages; sons who took over responsibility for the separate operations; a grandson who bought the resort. Segue to great-uncle Harold who inherited some of the property and later sold it to Greg’s father, mixed in with other family ties and transactions.

The result as it stands today is the resort with its main building, guest centre and conference room, 30 cottages, spa, pool and waterfront area; and the adjoining 210-acre farm, where Greg’s father, Peter, raises beef cattle, ducks and turkeys.

Eighty per cent of the beef served in the resort’s two restaurants comes from those grain-fed cattle. The meat is processed 20 kilometres away at Hilts Butcher Shop and the poultry at Morrison’s Custom Poultry Processing in Omemee. Every slice of duck and turkey Elmhirst’s serves comes from the farm, including the duck topping for poutine at the Wild Blue Yonder Pub.

A large garden near the resort entrance produces up to 8,000 pounds of vegetables and herbs for the restaurants each summer: “Lots of tomatoes, some squash, a tiny bit of corn, sort or ornamental, heirloom style potatoes,” Elmhirst says. “And lots of herbs, basically all the herbs we use.”

Guests appreciate the commitment to locally produced food, he says: “We have more people at Elmhirst’s because of it.”

Guests would be less aware of other ecologicallyvfriendly aspects of the operation.

Not far from the garden is a new, roughly 2,500-square-foot building, open at one end. Inside sits a giant pile of what appears to be wood shavings. It is known as waste wood, ground-up scraps from the production of wooden pallets, furniture and cabinetry.

The waste wood feeds a compact, high efficiency boiler in a separate room at the back of the building. Hot water from the boiler is piped to radiators. Fans blow air across the rads and that warm air heats all the rooms and common areas in the main resort building.

The wood heat system evolved over time – organically, if you will. Elmhirst recalls that it began in the mid-1990s with outdoor, wood-fired boilers where “you just threw a four-foot log in.” The forced air system came later. Switching to wood pellet fuel in 2004 upped the efficiency rating and ended the need to feed logs to the boilers in the middle of the night.

The waste wood boiler, installed last year, burns even cleaner and has reduced heating costs by 75%, Elmhirst says.

Six years ago 11 of the 30 cottages were retrofitted under the federal ecoEnergy Retrofit Homes program. An energy consultant’s report on one cottage showed the upgrades reduced annual greenhouse gas emissions by two tonnes.

Elmhirst’s is also switching to all LED lighting in the cottages and guest rooms. The boats that guests can use are powered by low-emission four-stroke motors. There are two banks of solar panels, ground-mounted at the farm and roof-mounted on the main resort building.

The management team also developed naturally. Greg, whose first position was recreation director fresh out of college, is the de facto COO and CFO. Peter ran the resort until 10 years ago but now concentrates on the farm. Peter’s life partner, Anne Marshall, handles marketing. Greg’s wife, Martina Linde, runs the spa. Steve and Caroline, his brother and sister-in-law, are also involved.

Greg and Martina’s 23-year-old son has indicated he plans to extend the Elmhirst involvement to a sixth generation. That’s the latest development in an organic business model, both old-fashioned and new-age.

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner. By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, April 23, 2016.

Climate Change Action Plan Survey

Sustainable Peterborough is seeking YOUR help in creating the Climate Change Action Plan. As we move into the third phase of the project we’re seeking your thoughts on the draft community actions. Please click on your community below to provide your thoughts on draft community actions for your community:

 City of Peterborough
 Asphodel-Norwood
 Cavan Monaghan
 Douro-Dummer
 Havelock-Belmont-Methuen
 North Kawartha
 Otonabee-South Monaghan
 Selwyn
 Trent Lakes
 Curve Lake First Nation
 Hiawatha First Nation

2015 Report Card

The 2015 Report Card is now available; it is Sustainable Peterborough’s 4th Report Card! It highlights just a sampling of our numerous collective accomplishments. For a full listing of all the sustainable successes reported by our partner organizations, please visit our Sustainable Activities Database.

If you would like a few paper copies of the Report Card, please contact us.

No trees were harmed in the printing of our Report Card. The 2015 Report Card was printed on FSC certified 100% recycled paper, using vegetable inks!

 

Green power at the mall: Lansdowne Place works to offset its footprint on the planet

Lansdowne Place is like a village without housing, with an infrastructure system to match.

The mall is home to more than 100 retailers and fast food outlets, a department store and the city’s biggest supermarket. Approximately 1,000 people clock in for work every day.

It is also, and this might surprise those who equate shopping malls only with consumerism and rampant consumption, greener and more environmentally aware than most communities.

Cigarette butts are typically an eco-disaster, either as toxic, smelly litter or nasty additions to a landfill site.

At Lansdowne Place cigarette butts are collected and shipped to Terracycle, an innovative company that claims to be able to recycle anything.

“It’s the most disgusting smell. If you ever want to encourage somebody to give up smoking send them here and let them smell the bins,” says Diane Camelford, the mall’s general manager.

“UPS hates pickup days,” adds Mario Serracino, Lansdowne Place operating manager and, along with Camelford, its environmental conscience.

Every bit of material in the butts is recycled, Camelford says: plastic from the filters, paper, even cigarette packaging.

Lansdowne Place pays to ship the butts. In return it gets a volume-based credit that can be donated to a local charity. Just under a year into the program the credit has reached $70. It’s a token amount. The payoff comes from diverting those toxic butts from the landfill.

Regional Organics, just east of Lindsay, is another recycler Camelford and Serracino deal with.

Wet, heavy coffee grounds used to add considerably to the weight of mall waste trucked to Peterborough’s landfill. Now the grounds, primarily from Tim Hortons and McDonald’s, go to the mall’s Recycling Organic Room to be dried for weekly pickup. Regional Organics hauls away about 32 tonnes of grounds a year and uses it in a soil mix sold under its Sustainable Potting Soil label.

Coffee grounds are handled separately because they are too fine to be processed in the mall’s signature green waste program, the ORCA aerobic food digester. ORCA (not to be confused with the local flood management agency) is a composting system manufactured and marketed by Totally Green, another enviro company.

Food prep workers in the food court kitchens put all scraps into plastic bins about a foot wide, two feet long and four inches deep. Kitchen staff carry full bins to a room in the mall’s cavernous maintenance area, slide them into a rack and take back an empty one.

Mall staff weigh and record each bin then dump them into the ORCA, a shiny metal box about the size of one of those old metal soft drink dispensers where the bottles hung suspended from a grid. As the food scraps break down into odourless sludge, liquids are pulled out and flushed into the mall’s waste water system. Last year the mall shipped 23 tonnes of green waste to Totally Green.

The focus on sustainable operations is in part driven from the top down. Lansdowne Place is owned by the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP), which has a “green” mandate. HOOPP hired 20 VIC Management Inc., which has experience in sustainable practices, to run the mall. Camelford and Serracino work for 20 VIC.

But a bottom-up component is also necessary and the two managers foster that relationship.

“These programs wouldn’t be as successful as they are without our tenants. And they are motivated too, they know that that’s how we roll,” Camelford says.

There are tenant reward programs, including for top contributors to the ORCA digester, and tenants get regular green tips and reminders through the mall newsletter.

Waste management is one part of a program that includes equally comprehensive focus on cutting water and electricity consumption and the use of sustainable building materials. As a result, Lansdowne Place was the first retail mall in Canada to earn a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Silver designation.

There is more to come. Food court customers will soon take their trays to a central waste spot where mall staff will sort every item. Camelford thinks that could double ORCA’s green waste

output. Longer term, she and Serracino hope for a grey water system that uses waste water to irrigate the mall’s exterior gardens and plantings.

And as changing technology brings other new options, they expect to stay at the front of the curve.

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner.  By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, April 9, 2016.