Positively Impacting our Environment through our Operations
Today, primary responsibility for Pentair's Environmental, Health & Safety (EHS) practices rests with our global business unit leaders. Pentair's executive team reviews implications and outcomes of these practices through regularly scheduled operations reviews. Our President and Chief Operating Officer, Mike Schrock, is responsible for overseeing our strategy in this arena, supported by our VP of Global Operations.
Pentair is continually evaluating ways to employ sustainable environmental practices and reduce our manufacturing impact. We have many initiatives under way to conserve and improve use of energy, water, waste and emissions. That's why the Citizenship Council, acting on one of its core mandates to help the company identify areas for improvement, recommended - and the leadership team has endorsed - the following environmental stewardship initiatives:
- EHS Governance:
The Company has staffed a corporate EHS leader to drive cross-business unit excellence. Furthermore, stewardship will emanate from the plant-level where each facility will designate a leader to monitor EHS performance and ensure compliance with internal and external standards.
- EHS Training:
The Company will provide annual environmental and safety training programs for its plant EHS leaders, and site Operations Leaders as well as for other key business unit personnel worldwide.
- EHS Auditing:
The Company will annually audit at least 10 percent of its manufacturing facilities worldwide to ensure environmental and safety compliance are being met to internal and external standards and requirements. Every key manufacturing site will be audited at least once every five years.
- EHS Continuous Improvement:
The Company will actively pursue initiatives to improve efficiency of energy, water consumption, emissions and waste. Furthermore, we will undertake initiatives to improve the health and safety of employees worldwide. Finally, through our PIMS Lean Enterprise processes, the organization will continue to drive safety and environmental improvements through Kaizens and routine management activities. We have already launched an effort to reduce energy consumption across Pentair, beginning by focusing on our top ten electricity and natural gas consuming facilities. These ten facilities consume approximately 75 percent of PNR's electricity and natural gas.
We believe these are the first, critical steps to improving our environmental practices in a comprehensive manner. Yet, even without a formal program in place prior to 2008, our operations worldwide have successfully implemented and tracked their environmental practices, policies and impact. Case in point: Technical Products' Anoka, Minnesota facility. Setting high standards for its own practices, this Pentair site illustrates the direction we are headed company-wide.
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Positively Impacting our Environment through our Operations
In the mid-1990's, Hoffman's Anoka, Minnesota site leadership team began to examine how it might best implement Pentair's commitment of respect for the environment. By employing Lean Enterprise principles, including the call for continuous improvement, the Anoka team began to incorporate increasingly eco-friendly materials and processes into its already-efficient operations. The site's environmental initiatives have produced significant results:
- Decrease of 40 percent - or 20 million gallons - of annual water consumption since 1998
- Reduction of 91 percent - or 292,000 pounds - per year, in solvent emissions since 1991
- Decrease of 56 percent in natural gas usage since 1995
- Reduction of 1,532 drums - or 674,000 pounds -
per year, in drummed liquid and sludge waste since 1995
- Decrease in industrial landfill waste of 51 percent - or 655,750 pounds - since 2005, as a result of the site's recycling program for all scrap powder paint
- Reduction of 30,000 pounds of waste water solids discharged annually since 2006
As remarkable as these achievements are, Hoffman's Anoka team remains focused on improving further. In 2008 alone, they have installed additional insulation on paint drying ovens to prevent radiant heat loss, for an estimated gas savings of $44,000 per year; replaced 1,800 400-watt lights with more efficient 360-watt lights, and are testing 150 high-efficiency fluorescent lights in assembly areas. In addition, the team is working to virtually eliminate all landfill wastes from production and office operations; implement an office paper recycling program; and recycle all aluminum cans and plastics in food service areas.
In addition to the Technical Products business, Pentair is also making strides in reducing its environmental impact in the Water Group. For example, over the past two years, Pentair's White Bear Lake, Minnesota site lowered its annual water usage by over 60 percent from 6.4 million to 2.4 million gallons, while simultaneously increasing plant output, through a variety of initiatives to reuse, recover and reduce water usage. Additionally, the project has generated significant utility savings.
As a company, we are proud of these accomplishments as well as the others too numerous to mention here: they reflect our core values of accountability and stewardship. They also complement our continuous drive to improve efficiency.
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Committed to More
We also recognize many opportunities within Pentair to enhance our environmental stewardship. Acting on its mandate to identify opportunities and make recommendations for improvements, the Citizenship Council is working now to determine appropriate and consistent reporting metrics for energy and water consumption, and for emissions and hazardous and solid waste generation. Once identified and standardized, these metrics will be reviewed regularly so that process improvements can be made throughout the company to help ensure our continued environmental - and financial - stewardship of our resources. We are rolling out formal policies and procedures to capture environmental metrics and we look forward to sharing externally our results and progress in the near future.
Business Involvement in Military and Nuclear Applications
Some Pentair products are used in applications which support military, defense and nuclear energy end markets. For example, some of Pentair's off-the-shelf commercial water pumps, and filtration devices help create potable water for United States military troops. Some Pentair Technical Products' components stabilize or cool electronic component or homeland security communications equipment. These examples represent a very small fraction of our total product sales, and Pentair does not manufacture weapons or artillery. Pentair technologies and product solutions made specifically for use in military, defense and nuclear applications represent less than 1 percent of total company revenues.
Award-Winning Environmental Efforts
In recognition of its waste reduction results, Pentair's Anoka, Minnesota facility received the Minnesota Governor's Award for Excellence in Waste and Pollution Prevention in 2005, and the Environmental Award for Waste Reduction from Anoka County in 2006, for its conversion to powder paint systems.
Reflecting both strong environmental stewardship and attention to costs, the conversion from liquid to powder paint resulted in the elimination of hazardous chemicals, of hazardous air pollutants to the outdoors, and of waste. The switch also resulted in lower fuel costs for the site, as the powder paint system recycles filtered warm air back into the facility, significantly reducing the amount of fuel required to heat the facility. This is just one of the many examples of how Pentair's environmental stewardship makes good business sense.
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