In recent years, the decline of the pulp and paper industry has had a devastating effect on the forestry economy across Canada, but particularly in Québec. The provincial government is actively seeking innovative alternatives, and wood pellet production has become a key consideration for the future of the forestry sector.

Wood pellets are an organic biofuel and are made by compressing sawdust into small granular pieces that can be burned in a furnace to generate heat, and this can also be converted into green energy to generate green electrical power. This process emits fewer pollutants when compared to other forms of combustion heating, and wood is preferable to many conventional, non-renewable resources as trees can be regrown. La Granaudière is a perfect test case.

The village of Saint Michel des Saints is located on the southern edge of an immense forest, and it has a long history in forestry, lumber, and wood processing. In 1989, a wood processing company came to Saint Michel des Saints looking for a place to build a new facility, and the region became home to an oriented strand board (OSB) mill that employed just over two hundred local residents and produced roughly 500 million square feet of OSB annually.

The community has a workforce with a great deal of expertise in these fields, but in recent years, the decline of the pulp and paper industry has created instability in the local economy. Rising wood and fuel costs, combined with a steep decline in the price of OSB put the company in a poor enough position that it was forced to shut the facility down at the end of 2007, and an adjacent sawmill owned by the same company was sold off.

A mix of hardwood and softwood is harvested from Québec forests every year, and traditionally, the hardwood would be sold primarily to customers in the pulp and paper industry. As that industry continues to decline, the Québec forest ministry is left uncertain about what to do with the extra hardwood stock. To protect the sustainability of forestry operations, the policy of the ministry is to only provide permits to wood harvesting companies if there is a designated application for the entire harvested crop of trees.

As a result, large portions of the hardwood forests that would have previously been collected are now over-mature and beginning to degrade. La Granaudière will help to solve this problem by creating a new application for that crop. “They call that the frozen forest because there are no permits for how to use that wood, so we are going to defrost those over-mature areas. Then we will be participating in the sustainability of the forest by reducing emissions of GHG (greenhouse gases). To a certain extent, we are the test case for the government of Québec,” said La Granaudière Project President and Chief Executive Officer Yves A. Crits.

This project will also help to improve sustainability by providing an application for branch waste. Traditionally, tree harvesting resulted in branches being left behind on the forest floor. As they decompose, a great amount of carbon is released into the surrounding environment. La Granaudière has plans to harvest those branches so that they can be processed into wood chips. “By reusing forest chips, we are going to provide a use for low-value wood, reducing even further the impact of GHG emissions and improving further the sustainability of the forest,” said Yves.

More than a decade after the Louisiana Pacific OSB plant closed down putting more than two hundred people out of work, La Granaudière has demonstrated a plan to revitalize the local economy and community. It will be bringing approximately fifty new jobs to the area within the production plant itself and 180 total jobs including forestry operation and logistics.

La Granaudière is located on a four-hundred-acre plot of industrial land that is 1.5 kilometres from the nearest home and four kilometres from the local sawmill, with direct access to logging roads. This means that the facility will not only have a highly-skilled workforce, but it will be connected to incoming transport forest routes for renewable, competitively-priced feedstock both as raw logs from the forest and residue from the local sawmills.

As well as the proximity to logging roads for incoming raw material, Saint Michel des Saints is also an ideal location for outbound transport. The facility is located near a deep-water port on the St. Lawrence River with a shipping route connecting it to the European market. A dedicated fleet of trucks will run continuously transporting pellets between the plant and the port.

In Québec, the independent chief forester is in charge of determining the maximum sustainable volume of wood that can be perpetually harvested, and the forest ministry is then in charge of portioning that harvest to companies under supply guarantees. The ministry has granted La Granaudière a right to cut hardwood for approximately 75 percent of its needs. This agreement enables the developers to offer supply chain and competitive price security to its customers by also mitigating take-or-pay risk.

After five years of in-house development, the project began at the end of August 2019. All of the engineering, procurement, and construction contracts were already signed and activated immediately at financial close. Three contractors: Québec City-based Shuot Inc., Player Design Inc. of Maine, and Law Marrot Milpro from Sainte Hyacinthe, Québec were all hired to work on various aspects of the project and broke ground last September. Due to the thorough preparatory planning, work is now moving swiftly, and the facility is expected to be at starting capacity by September of this year and at full production by 2022.

One of the most significant difficulties facing the La Granaudière project is finding sufficient manpower. Currently, Québec’s unemployment rate is below five percent, which is the lowest it has ever been since the statistics were first compiled in 1976 and lower than any other province, and this has made finding qualified labour a challenge for the company.

The project developers have devised an innovative solution to this problem. “We are going to bring back the people who had to leave to find work outside the village when the Louisiana Pacific plant closed down in 2007. We are going to increase the quality of life for those people by having them come back home to where they were living before,” says Yves.

The La Granaudière facility will have the ability to process a range of raw materials on-site into four grades of wood pellet products. It will de-bark raw logs, chip branches, and compress residues from sawmills. For home heating, it will offer a premium quality pellet that generates very little ash. For district heating, it will offer a secondary, low-to-moderate ash grade product. Finally, for industrial power generation, it will offer two grades of moderate and high-ash pellets. All of these products will receive comprehensive screening to ensure that they meet the quality standards demanded by customers and work toward achieving Sustainable Biomass Program and ENPlus certifications.

As the declining pulp and paper industry brings ongoing economic uncertainty to many regions in Québec, the La Granaudière project is on track to give new life to the forestry sector. “There are two major activities in the village of Saint Michel des Saints: tourism and forestry. We are going to revive the village by recovering the prosperity of the area,” Yves stated confidently.

The post Revitalizing a Community With Renewable Energy<p class="company">La Granaudière</p> appeared first on Resource In Focus.

As businesses around the world struggle to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, Badinotti finds itself positioned for growth. Over the last two years, the company was forced to redirect its effort toward building and implementing new processes and technologies to accommodate the challenges of pandemic life. As a result, Badinotti Canada has come out of it ready to grow and is already looking to expand its East Coast presence.

In these challenging couple of years, the company has learned to be adaptable and has developed a plan to be proactive going forward. “Adaptability is the biggest key strategy here as far as the amount of challenges we’ve faced during COVID and being able to pivot quickly and find ways around them,” says Director of Sales and Marketing Marc Halverson.

Although still headquartered in Campbell River, British Columbia, the company’s expansion to the East Coast is now underway, and it expects to establish a physical presence to grow there.

At well over one hundred employees, Badinotti has continued to expand its skilled team and there are no plans to slow down. “We’re looking at expanding not only our services, but our product lines and our overall strategies, and it is only going to become realized and possible with a bigger team,” says Halverson.

A common trend in organizations is to have employees wear many hats, which can be beneficial because it allows people to fill in for others or provide quality assistance as needed. However, the Badinotti leaders find that it can also prevent people from further developing their primary strengths. The solution to this problem is simply to have more people on staff and allow them to do what they are best at, rather than attempting to spread their talent too thinly across multiple specialties. This is part of the company culture at Badinotti, and it has resulted in more efficiency and better performance overall.

Many other factors help make Badinotti a great place to work for eager, young professionals. Halverson has had the experience of working with several manufacturers, ranging from multi-billion dollar companies to smaller privately-owned businesses. This well-rounded knowledge made it very clear to him that Badinotti was the right fit for him.

“From the moment I started with Badinotti, it’s been very apparent. It’s a great working environment; the people are listeners, and everybody’s open-minded. We’re not afraid to give our own two cents to an issue or a subject, but we also take in everyone else’s perspectives, helping us to get the best possible action or decision.”

When people are in a position to complete work they are passionate about, it keeps their morale and motivation high. It is a successful strategy because happy employees tend to stick around.

As the company has dealt with a particularly taxing last couple of years, Badinotti became even more firm in its commitment to be a considerate and supportive employer. “We’re very accommodating, completely understanding of people’s personal needs and how that translates into their work efforts and their performance,” explains Halverson. “Open lines of communication are important. I have always said to my team that there’s literally no subject that you can’t bring up to me.” The leaders have successfully created a positive and enjoyable workplace environment through transparency with their people.

Working at Badinotti is particularly exciting due to the innovative nature of its work in aquaculture. The company is looking forward to new and upcoming projects currently under development, and it is hoping to have a more formal announcement on these later this year.

There are two major challenges in the aquaculture industry: finding sustainable options to help cut costs in net washing services and sea lice mitigation. Dealing with sea lice is a new area for Badinotti, and the team is discovering innovative technology and strategies to help alleviate the problem. The issue is particularly troublesome on the East Coast, where these small but intrusive crustaceans are responsible for killing off millions of dollars of fish for Badinotti’s customers.

As far as net washing, Badinotti is looking at alternatives to reduce the costs of its services and finding new products to help increase the efficiency and longevity of its nets. The company is also focused on improving the reputation of the industry through more sustainable efforts.

“What the industry needs and what we’re trying to spearhead is an effort in being more sustainable in our materials and transparent with the public too. Among some groups there can be a negative connotation to fish farming and aquaculture in general. It may be perceived by these people as irresponsible action or environmental damage,” says Halverson. “So we’re trying to get in front of that and promote our industry as new and sustainable through the use of current efforts such as bio-based recycled fibres, systems that are easier to track and relocate if something happens on a site, eliminating debris, and also clear end-of-life strategies for equipment,” says Halverson.

The end-of-life strategy refers to how the materials and nets are handled when they need to be taken out of service and disposed of. Once the product’s usefulness has been reached, Badinotti offers to take back the material so that the customer does not have the burden of disposal. To improve sustainability in the industry, Badinotti then finds ways to recycle that material, rather than sending it to a landfill, which is the worst-case scenario for such a large product.

“Whatever we’re putting in the water, we want to make sure it comes out and doesn’t leave any sort of negative impact when it is in there. That means eliminating chemicals and degradation of any sort, so bio-based recyclable fibres are important, and then also being able to have a strategy to take the burden of that product off the hands of our clients when it’s done,” says Halverson.

Committing to the ongoing effort to improve the aquaculture industry’s environmental impact is an everyday endeavour at Badinotti. People are more impassioned than previous generations and are more willing to participate in helping to improve environmental behaviours than ever before.

“I think that if you have stereotypes or false perspectives on what it is that we do, it’s up to us to correct that misinformation, and the only way to do that is to be more transparent in what we are doing. So we’re meeting literally daily, on some level, regarding our sustainability efforts, and being more environmentally friendly,” explains Halverson.

Another reason that aquaculture is an exciting industry to be a part of, is that fish farming is one of the only scalable protein sources. The negative environmental impacts of red meat have been well documented, and one protein source that can be scaled up in production to feed people all over the world is fish. We are on a planet where water makes up almost three-quarters of its surface. There are more suitable locations to find protein in the ocean that will cause much less of an environmental impact, and Badinotti strives to increase awareness about fish as a more viable option as our population on planet Earth grows.

The team is excited to find innovative solutions to the new challenges in the industry such as sea lice. Already standing behind its significant industry improvements, the company will continue to move aquaculture and fish farming into the future as a quality, sustainable protein source. Halverson expects to see an uptick in demand for seafood and a larger presence of fish farming, especially as more of the environmental initiatives continue to show progress.

“We are changing the perception and being more open with what our effort is. We’re doing things that we believe are the best way to not only provide a source of food for the world, but we’re also doing it in the most environmentally responsible manner,” concludes Halverson. “One of our biggest focuses is getting some of these new developments and exciting new technologies out in the open, and we are convinced it will change what people think.”

The post Raising the Bar on Sustainability in Aquaculture<p class="company">Badinotti Net Services Canada</p> appeared first on Resource In Focus.

Since it was established twenty-five years ago, the Falcon Group has served over 15,000 multi-family communities. Its offices all along the East Coast employ a professional staff of engineers: civil, structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire protection, as well as architects, interior designers, and construction managers.

A large portion of the work completed by Falcon includes renovating existing housing stock, rather than new construction. “As homes and buildings get older, they require repairs to their structural systems and infrastructure,” explains Falcon Group Executive Vice President Orlando Ballate. “The average owner-occupied home in New York City is fifty-seven years old, and throughout the U.S., half of the commercial buildings built in the country were constructed prior to 1980, so they are over forty-one years old. These aging homes and buildings require a tremendous amount of upgrades, repairs, and major renovation work.”

As these multi-family residential communities or large condominium high rises in urban areas continue to age, it is important to plan and preserve their structural integrity and common elements with a capital reserve fund, a set amount of money put aside each year to replace or repair major building components in the future. The purpose of this type of funding is to avoid large unplanned payments as a result of special assessments that indicate improvements must be made to the building. Rather than being hit unexpectedly with a $20,000 assessment for a large improvement, a capital reserve is ready with available funds when these common elements need to be repaired or replaced. In certain states through the U.S., capital reserve funding is mandated for all shared buildings and communities.

The types of common elements covered under capital reserves include roadways, underground infrastructure, water lines, the building’s roof, windows, exterior cladding, and side amenities such as clubhouses, swimming pools, walkways, courts, and playgrounds. “You want to set aside and establish a capital reserve fund when you live in these communities, and as a general rule, the annual capital reserve funding should be two percent of the value of your home, starting when the home was built,” says Ballate.

For existing communities that do not currently have any capital reserve, a detailed study should be conducted to determine the capital reserve funding and to avoid any huge special assessments. The Falcon Group frequently works with communities that have not funded their capital reserve, and the process often requires millions of investment dollars to repair and replace the common elements that have been neglected. Without delay, the firm is attempting to raise awareness about capital reserve funding because the current interest rates for loans to fund capital reserves are at an all-time low, and it is a great time to plan to preserve the value of your home and community.

One project underway at the Falcon Group is for a community of over 1,200 homes distributed over six buildings. Since capital reserve funding was overlooked in this sixty-year-old community, the price amounts to more than $80 million to bring the infrastructure and common elements up to date. Significant repairs are required for the heating and cooling system, roadways and parking garages, building facades, windows, and the project includes renovation of the lobbies, hallways, and roofs. A loan has been taken out to fund the capital project, and it will be distributed over ten years.

Unfortunately, due to the shortage of skilled labor, proper supervision, and the growing complexity of building systems, new construction today is fraught with construction defects. Many of these defects can result in damage like flooding, water leakage and mold conditions, fire safety hazards, and disruption to occupancy. According to Ballate, the answer to this potential problem is a transition engineering study.

“For peace of mind of the association, community, or building owner, a transition engineering study should be performed right after construction in order to identify any major construction defects by the builder. The period of time in which construction defects litigation can be brought against a builder varies from six to ten years depending on state laws or as what’s referred to as the statute of repose.”

A statute of repose is a fixed period after which a lawsuit cannot be pursued. Once the statutory period ends, it provides a clear defense of liability, and this is to protect the builder from long-term liability claims. Transition engineering studies should be completed as soon as possible when transferring ownership from the developer or builder to protect the investment.

The cost of solar photovoltaic technology has come down quite a bit and this has led to an increase in solar panel installations on building roofs across the country. “These [photovoltaic] projects have a payback, or return on investment, in about three to four years. Solar panels cost anywhere from eight to ten cents per kilowatt-hour. The cost of a solar panel installation of 6 to 12 kW is in the range of $11,000 to $26,000, and the payback on these solar installations, which can last twenty to thirty years, is only four to five years. This is because the cost of electricity is going up, and the free solar energy can not only power your home but, depending on where you’re located and the size of your solar array, you can also sell the power back to the utility company,” explains Ballate.

Photovoltaic shingles, also known as building-integrated photovoltaics, are a particularly popular choice these days. The solar panels appear and function similarly to conventional shingles while generating electricity. The cost is roughly 15,000 dollars for a house. It weighs thirteen pounds per square foot and should last three decades. When the time comes to replace shingles, this is a valuable investment that owners can choose.

For most residents, their home is their greatest asset. The best way to increase the value of this asset is by investing in the home and community through renovation projects. In a shared building, one important area is the lobby because it gives the building’s first impression. In recent years, the lobby has also become more essential in terms of storage due to the high number of deliveries from Amazon and other online suppliers.

“We renovate the lobby, and we increase the storage space that’s available to the residents in the building to make it more manageable. Hallway and lighting renovations are also important, using energy-efficient LED lighting and the modernization of elevators.” Ballate explains that running elevators takes up roughly twenty-five percent of the building’s energy usage. An elevator upgrade is a valuable renovation because of its faster speed; it improves safety and [has a] significant impact on energy efficiency. New modern elevators are also safer and faster than their forerunners.

Another type of improvement that can be done to a high-rise building is rooftop terraces and gardens. These rooftop gardens can be found throughout New York City due to limited space, and the Falcon Group has found that these substantially improve the value of the individual homes within a building. This can be a beautiful space where the building’s residents can spend time with friends and enjoy the weather outdoors.

Community spaces in a building should be upgraded to include better remote workstations for the large number of people choosing to continue working from home after the pandemic. Bringing the building’s technology up to date and enabling WiFi in all common areas is also a nice feature to upgrade an existing building. Other valuable additions could include movie rooms, meeting rooms, game rooms, golf simulators, and any other features interesting to today’s residents.

Coping with a pandemic the last year and a half has elevated people’s concern about proper ventilation systems within a shared building’s common areas. According to the CDC, indoor spaces are riskier than outdoor spaces, and a building’s mechanical ventilation system can minimize potential viral spread. Increasing ventilation from outdoor air lowers the concentration of air-borne contaminants.

“What we find in these older buildings that we work with is that they have little or no air exchange, or ventilation where outdoor air is coming in and air movement is very important,” says Ballate. “So we’ve made a tremendous amount of improvements in many buildings through increasing the ventilation systems in the building, increasing the air movement and air exchange to improve, and reduce the possibility of viral spread.”

With the aging housing stock and commercial buildings in the U.S., the need to plan for capital improvement projects is only growing. Proper capital reserve funding is required to maintain the value and safety of homes and communities. Once a project is identified, the professional team at Falcon can expertly assess, design, and solicit the best price for the project, before managing the construction to completion.

The Falcon Group’s growing firm of 150 architects, engineers, and construction managers is passionate about improving the aging infrastructure throughout the country at the lowest possible cost to communities in need. “There’s a tremendous need for what we do, and we just want to help communities and individuals manage their real estate assets properly,” concludes Ballate.

The post Improving America’s Housing Stock<p class="company">Falcon Group</p> appeared first on Resource In Focus.

For businesses in every industry, 2020 was a complicated period of unpredictability and adjustment. For the Canadian netting company, this time was used to analyze its processes and methods of interacting with its customers. Traditionally, most of its processes had a hands-on approach, based on in-person meetings that included a heavy paper trail. In the last year, the pandemic has been a springboard for Badinotti to pivot its strategy and adopt its own digital platform to improve its cloud based network.

“This past year was extremely challenging, but it created internal pressures on us, and pressure produces growth. It made us look at everything in a new light, and it allowed us to consider these other strategies that we may not have otherwise prioritized. We developed tools to interface with our own employees first, and then, based on that success, we’ve been able to develop external, client-facing digital tools for reporting, client interactions, and so on in a quick turnaround time,” says Badinotti Net Services Canada Director of Sea Operations Trevor Schiele.

Having worked in aquaculture since graduating high school, Trevor has always been interested in continuing the industry. He grew up on the coast of British Columbia, in a community heavily based in the resource sectors with primary industries in forestry, mining, and fishing. His first post-secondary education path led him to a company that provided service support to the local aquaculture firms, and this is where he discovered his passion for the industry. With the opportunity to experience the innovative and robust nature of aquaculture, Trevor found his calling.

For twelve years, he stuck with the steady, meaningful, year-round work in the aquaculture processing division. “The reliability and the continuity that came from aquaculture was second-to-none, and because of that, it also provided the most opportunity for growth, innovation, and change. Growing up in BC, we have our options, but aquaculture has always been the best choice for me because of that continuity and the ability to stay in the coastal areas,” says Trevor.

As life moved forward and Trevor became a parent, he decided to go back to school. At the age of twenty-seven, he completed a distance education program though the B.C. Institute of Technology in Occupational Health Sciences. The degree helped to open his mind to industrial processes and risk management in aquaculture, which eventually led him to the Badinotti team where he has now been for five years. “I was born in Campbell River, and I’m very proud to be a part of aquaculture and raise my family in close proximity to where I grew up.”

As a result of its connection to its parent company, Badinotti Canada has access to highly innovative technology for netting products and services. In the last two years, it has implemented more environmentally-friendly equipment for its subsea operations. Across its marine fleet, the company has introduced electric net washing remotely operated vehicles (ROVs).

“These ROVs use twenty percent of the previous energy output to operate. They’ve eliminated environmental risks for operating, lowered our carbon footprint, and increased the fish health quality,” explains Trevor. “The adoption of this technology has revolutionized our ability to serve our clients, which has also opened up many other opportunities for us; for example, environmental monitoring, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.”

In collaboration with its clients, Badinotti is currently working on a few image recognition software projects. It collects subsea environmental risk data and operational data to streamline the processes and make data-driven decisions much faster. The company has also implemented in situ equipment on a new level, further separating it from the competition. The in situ washing process makes it possible for large nets to be washed without having to be moved. Badinotti only continues to increase and improve its offerings to its clients.

The parent company has also developed an innovative platform called EasyTrack to help clients keep track of operations. Since the nets are owned by the clients and serviced by Badinotti, it is important for the client to be able to check on their assets. EasyTrack is an external portal from the company website that allows clients to look at net servicing or repairs throughout the process, and at the end, it also consolidates their billing. Clients can log on to see where their nets are before making informed, data-driven decisions, and this allows them to create efficiencies within their own business. Worldwide, all of Badinotti’s operations are moving towards including EasyTrack.

As mentioned earlier, the other most recent technological advancement for Badinotti is the adoption of its own internal digital platform. Partially motivated by the pandemic, the company established a cloud-based intranet to communicate more efficiently with its employees. It initially focused on the sea operations team, a group of workers based on remote vessels serving the aquaculture industry. After gaining the necessary experience, Badinotti has now brought four mobile apps to market for various uses including operations production, loss control, environmental health and safety, and quality control. It has also developed its external tools to improve communication with clients.

Despite any struggles in aquaculture, those within the industry are dedicated to helping it grow sustainably, innovating and maintaining the industry’s integrity as it progresses. “One of the things we see in aquaculture, at least in the contact we have with our clients, is their great commitment to improve the environmental footprint they leave,” says Badinotti Net Services Canada Marketing Coordinator Miriam Salmeron.

Both the east and west coasts of Canada are ideal for year-round aquaculture production, and this reliability serves the marketplace very well. As a key part of the supply chain, aquaculture provides a consistent healthy product twelve months a year, and the science-based evidence backing aquaculture is very strong compared to other types of agrifoods.

The industry is working towards more investment in organized marketing efforts at the national and provincial levels to combat the lack of awareness about the strides aquaculture has made. In the last two decades, the industry has improved tremendously with regard to its environmental footprint, sustainability, and fish health, and the public must be made aware of these changes for aquaculture to continue to grow and innovate.

With no real way to control misinformation, the focus has been on providing informative data that is verifiable and comes from a credible source. This can be particularly challenging in Canada where eighty percent of the population lives in non-maritime provinces, and people are far removed from the aquaculture industry.

The rate of innovation and change in the industry is significant, and Canada needs a national strategy to educate the layperson about how far aquaculture has come in such a short time. “We need key communications of the positive benefits of aquaculture as a piece in the global agrifood supply chain. And a second part of that is the adoption of the industrial internet of things and A.I. to make it the most efficient source of protein in the world,” says Trevor.

Hopefully, the industry will become a more stable environment that will allow aquaculture to continue to grow across Canada in a way that it remains competitive in the world production scene. There are very few places left on earth that are ideal for cultivating salmon, and Canada has many of those untapped resources. “We need some stability, and in order to get that stability, we need the support from the Canadian people.”

The aquaculture industry is always changing, innovating, and adopting new technologies to improve its processes. Badinotti and other organizations that recognize social license and environmental impact are very attractive career opportunities for young professionals entering the workplace. Despite any roadblocks that get in the way, the future of the industry looks bright for Canada, and sustainable aquaculture will prevail.

The post Improving Aquaculture with Innovation and Technology<p class="company">Badinotti Net Services Canada</p> appeared first on Resource In Focus.

“We have grown to be far more than just a bottled water company, and we wanted our name to reflect that. Ice River Sustainable Solutions represents where the brand is today and its ongoing efforts to protect the environment for generations to come,” says Crystal Howe, the company’s Sustainability Manager. Using innovative resources and methods to retain plastic material within the value chain, IRSS has managed to keep over 450 million pounds of plastic out of landfills since 2009.

A more recent development for the company is its move from partial ownership to full ownership of C.R. Plastic Products. This branch of the company transforms recycled plastic caps and other recycled materials into quality, eco-friendly, outdoor furniture. IRSS experienced further growth with the introduction of BMP Extrusion, a partnership with Greenlid that provides a line of compostable products, the opening of the Shelburne water plant, the acquisition of Urban Polymers in Toronto, and an expansion of its recycled polyethylene terephthalate (RPET) production capacity.

The new Blue Mountain Plastics Extrusion (BMPE) plant has a modern film extrusion and printing facility. It produces thin, strong, engineered coalition shrink film that allows Ice River Sustainable Solutions to use less plastic wrap for its bottled water. “Due to its thin gauge and high strength, it reduces the plastic required to pack heavy products. With water being so heavy, it drastically reduces the amount of plastic film we need to use,” explains Howe. BMP Extrusion also has a state-of-the-art printer capable of printing eight colours with in-house ink-mixing and precision automated mounting.

Using BMP Extrusion’s advanced equipment, the Ice River Sustainable Solutions team has been focused on incorporating recycled material into its plastic film which is a new innovation for this type of blown film. Starting with post-industrial recycled material (PIR), they have achieved twenty percent recycled content, and they expect that number to increase over time.

With the Shelburne Water Plant, IRSS now has the entire operation—water plant, film plant, and recycling plant—all in one location. “Shelburne now takes us through the closed-loop cycle from film, RPET, and water production in one place. The water plant is state-of-the-art with a turnkey Krones [bottling] line and an Elettric80 Forklift and warehousing system,” describes Howe.

The company is eager to bring people in for tours when possible again after pausing the visits temporarily during the COVID-19 pandemic. The tours are interesting and engaging because visitors can watch their material go from the Blue Box right through to a finished product, which will hopefully lead to an increase in recycling and create greater trust in the larger recycling system.

Ice River Sustainable Solutions is committed to closed-loop recycling to eliminate waste through the reuse of materials. The company purchases PET, Type 1 post consumer bales from local material recovery facilities, and although some of the material in the bales is not perfectly usable PET for beverage containers, IRSS is continuously innovating to find a use for it all. The cap material is sent to C.R. Plastic Products to be turned into high-quality furniture. The company uses all of the green PET material from the Blue Box in its own Ice River Green Bottle Co. brand which keeps an additional 5 million pounds of plastic out of landfills every year.

“It is an exciting time to be part of the circular economy in Canada. With eleven years under our belt, we are excited to see more companies join in,” says Howe. “We are completely committed to producing only the most environmentally-aware products and packaging.”

The impact of COVID-19 put a great deal of stress on supply chains across the globe, but Ice River Sustainable Solutions was more fortunate than most. As a result of its vertical integration and local feedstock of PET for recycling, the company was well prepared for such an event. It did not have any supply chain interruptions since its PET bale supply is from local curbside collected material. Because of this, when the demand for bottled water increased at the beginning of the pandemic, IRSS was not only able to meet customer needs but was able to support the community with water donations and RPET bottles for hand sanitizer. Ice River employees are incredibly passionate and although COVID-19 was challenging for essential workers, they worked hard to ensure that bottled water was available to all who needed it.

The area of challenge is the misinformation and negativity surrounding plastics. “We feel that we represent the positive side of plastics. We want people to see what can happen when plastics are used responsibly. Plastic has a lot of good qualities but need to remain in the value chain and not in the environment,” says Howe.

Stakeholders in the plastics industry now recognize that keeping plastics in the value chain is essential, from a financial perspective as well as for environmental reasons. PET plastic is easily recyclable over and over again. The industry does not want it to end up in landfill.

The best way to stimulate change quickly is for industry groups, government, and environmental organizations to work together to find common ground. Ice River Sustainable Solutions is excited to be a part of that change as manufacturing, in general, moves towards cyclical models.

IRSS has been producing 100 percent recycled bottles since 2010. “The beverage industry is working hard to increase recycled content in their containers. The recycling industry is always finding new ways to recycle packaging, and brand owners know consumers want more sustainable products and packaging,” says Howe. Having worked to become a trusted voice for the recycling industry, IRSS is proud of the relationships it has formed with the government, customers, and suppliers.

Ice River Sustainable Solutions has earned its reputation as an environmentally-friendly bottled water company that has grown into a leader in continuous improvement of the plastics recycling industry. “I think, over the last few years, to be recognized as a company that can help and be a solution to the plastics problem has probably been our greatest success,” says Howe. With Co-Owners Jamie and Sandy Gott as the creative minds at the helm of the company, there are lots of new developments on the horizon. “We’ve developed an excellent team at IRSS, with a passion and dedication to the environment, and it’s very exciting.”

The post A Trusted Voice in the Canadian Recycling Industry<p class="company">Ice River Sustainable Solutions</p> appeared first on Resource In Focus.

“We use the term de-manufacturing because our facilities are run like manufacturing environments. We believe in lean principles; we use Six Sigma,” says CEO Steve Bush of the company’s procedures for process improvement, “and they are typically indoor facilities. We’re really trying to get as much of the material out of these appliances and into some sort of reuse as we can. Our goal is that ninety-five percent of the weight of the appliances goes back into some sort of recycling stream versus being put into a landfill.”

The unique aspect of Recleim’s operations is the way in which it handles polyurethane foam. If an appliance was manufactured prior to 1995, it is likely that chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerant was used as the blowing agent to insert the foam throughout the cabinet and get it to quickly expand to create the layer of insulation. CFC refrigerants have since been banned because they are greenhouse gases that damage the ozone layer when released into the environment.

Although there are recycling regulations in the United States that require the extraction of harmful fluid refrigerants from the cooling circuits of appliances and HVAC, there are no federal laws to enforce the same rules when it comes to the refrigerants trapped inside the foam. Another problem is that within the industry, it is less understood that the same CFC refrigerant is trapped inside the bubbles of the foam.

“If you were to take a regular refrigerator and take it to a recycler and they just shred it, they can release up to two pounds of CFC gas trapped inside the bubbles of the foam,” Bush says, but Recleim has an innovative solution to this problem. “We agitate the foam inside our shredding process and extract all of that gas, and then, in most of our plants, we take the gases trapped inside the foam and use a catalytic process to actually destroy the CFC refrigerant at 99.99 percent efficiency, which meets Montreal protocol.” This international treaty was agreed upon in 1987 and laid out a plan to phase out substances that deplete the ozone layer.

Recleim also provides a service to investor-owned utilities around the country that have energy-efficiency programs designed to encourage replacing old energy-inefficient appliances. Recleim acts as an agent call center to arrange meetings with the utility companies’ customers to remove their old refrigerators after upgrading to newer models.

After initially evaluating an investment opportunity to start a recycling business in Canada, the two entrepreneurs who founded the company quickly shifted their attention toward the United States where the recycling industry was more fragmented. The year was 2012, and many appliances at the time were disposed of by small recycling shops or scrapyards, and regulations were not as clear as they are today.

“In general, recycling and scrap had this seedy connotation, cash exchanging hands over a tailgate, and whatever happens after that nobody knows. What we wanted to do was provide a company that would have contracts, insurance, and indemnification and have much more of a corporate feel,” says Bush.

As the founders were both from small towns, they ambitiously focused on distressed areas that could benefit from an efficient recycling operation. “We decided that once we were going to launch this recycling company, we needed to locate it in a place that would provide not only a benefit to the environment but also benefit from a social perspective to the place we agreed to locate,” explains Bush.

Graniteville, South Carolina was the company’s first home. The small mill town was already experiencing a collapse in its economy after a freight train derailed and caused one of the worst chemical spills in U.S. history. The town lost thousands of its jobs and had nearly been abandoned before Recleim worked to restore the community. Since expanding the company into various states outside of South Carolina, it has maintained its vision to uplift communities along with the environment. Without exception, it chooses to locate in distressed areas and focus on hiring local people.

Recleim has twelve locations in the U.S., primarily east of Mississippi, and plans to expand further west in the next couple of years, beginning with Dallas. Three of these sites are de-manufacturing facilities, and the other nine are logistics hubs used to manage collected appliances. For the last three years, the company has been named in the annual rankings of Inc. Magazine’s five hundred fastest-growing privately-held companies in the U.S., peaking at 101 on the list.

A recent challenge is that the commodity markets are under pressure due to tariffs and the global uncertainty driven by the trade war between the U.S. and China. The company has seen the price of steel and other materials generated from appliances drop significantly in the last year and a half. However, the main day-to-day hurdle is to raise awareness about the two pounds of CFC gas trapped inside the foam of older refrigerators and to educate people about the environmental damage of sending these appliances to a landfill.

Even if the rest of the appliance is recycled, it is important to properly dispose of the foam to prevent ozone-depleting gases from being released into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, there is currently no law in the U.S. preventing people from discarding appliances in landfills, and this is still a relatively common occurrence.

In Europe, recyclers are more advanced than in the U.S. since there is limited land mass. The founders of Recleim travelled to Europe before establishing the company to learn about efficient recycling, and they brought these innovative ideas and European technologies back to the U.S. “The biggest differentiator in our recycling process is how we handle those gases. We either capture the gas directly in the recycling process or we use liquid nitrogen to take that blowing agent and convert it into a liquid so that it can be captured and sent to one of our destruction facilities.”

By using manufacturing techniques in reverse to de-manufacture appliances, Recleim can separate, capture, and recycle more of each unit than a typical recycling operation. “We have multiple kinds of sorting technologies on the backside of our recycling lines so that we’re able to separate copper and aluminum and plastic into sellable commodities. We really strive to increase the purity level of our commodity outputs because we believe the purer the recycled commodity we can get, the better we’ll be paid for it.”

As Recleim expands throughout the U.S., it remains dedicated to its founding values of pursuing locations in economically distressed areas. It bases these important decisions on census tract and Opportunity Zone data. To empower and uplift the community, it hires employees locally to help with job demographics in the area. It is also committed to supporting local veterans in a variety of ways.

In the future, it plans to continue looking for new ways to improve its efficiency. This includes finding buyers for materials captured by the company’s de-manufacturing process that are not currently going into a recycle stream. For instance, Recleim is investing in research for waste to energy (WtE) opportunities that can utilize the processed foam. WtE would allow it to generate energy from its collected waste that cannot be recycled otherwise, instead of having to dispose of it into a landfill.

In addition to its goals of ongoing improvement, the company is actively educating the industry and the general population on how appliances should be properly recycled to ensure we are protecting the environment.

“The most important message is that appliances, especially refrigerators and freezers and any appliance that contains foam, have to be handled in an appropriate way, and that means you have to capture to gases that are trapped inside the bubbles of the foam, they should not be taken to a landfill or sent to a scrapyard that isn’t capable of capturing those gases,” Bush explains emphatically.

According to Project Drawdown, an organization of global scientists studying climate change and potential solutions, the leading way to mitigate climate change today is refrigerant management. Hopefully, Recleim’s method of recycling and its important message will continue to spread throughout the nation.

The post Making an Impact<p class="company">Recleim</p> appeared first on Resource In Focus.

The history of the company reaches back to Lower Saxony, Germany in the early years of the First World War. At the time, Carl Kaefer was making his living by selling peat moss and had found a fair amount of success in that venture. After a few years of learning about and working with peat, he realized that he could sell it as an insulation medium for industrial ships. By the end of the war, he decided it was time to go into business for himself, and in 1918 he did just that.

In the 1940s, the company had expanded from insulating ships to insulating industrial plants, and its propensity to grow has continued ever since. Today, after more than one hundred years in business, KAEFER is world-renowned as an innovator in the field of insulation.

KAEFER Canada specializes in industrial and commercial insulation with a focus on thermal and acoustic insulation, which is designed to limit the transfer of both heat and sound. Recently, the company has been working to expand the capabilities of its Canadian branch to include additional services such as scaffolding, painting, coating, and fireproofing. Outside of Canada, these services are already central to the company, so the expertise and experience are already developed.

“Our customers benefit from our reliability, experience, quality, global presence, and aggregated technology on a combined multiservice solution. That’s what we bring to the market in Canada. We hear the same from all of our sites, that we always bring more value to our customers in terms of tech and innovation,” says Chief Executive Officer Rafael Machado. He is a relatively new addition to the KAEFER Canada team, having come on board in September of 2020 after fourteen years working in several countries with the KAEFER group.

The company is made up of a small but efficient group of fifty specialists who work across more than ten sites, including a head office in St. Albert where it has a small prefabrication shop. It invests heavily in technology and has a competent team of expert engineers. A team of senior estimators and senior multidisciplinary project managers can manage both insulation and scaffolding. There are also business development experts, controllers, administrative staff, and a health, safety, environment, and quality (HSEQ) team.

KAEFER provides its services to a diverse collection of competitive markets. To distinguish itself, the company has invested a great deal of time and money into refining the overall effectiveness of its operation using lean site management methodology and digitization initiatives.

“We are investing hard in lean management and digitization to improve our management capacity and bring value to our customers. During COVID, this has become more and more important, because with people working from home, you need ways to inspect your site and know what’s going on even when you can’t be there. We’ve invested in digital solutions to manage the job remotely. KAEFER is in the vanguard of that,” says Machado. The company has been on what it calls its ‘lean journey’ for more than eight years, and it is now on a digital transformation journey as well.

KAEFER aims to be much more than a service provider. On any job site, the company’s goal is to build a deep knowledge of the specific needs of the project. This ensures that the team can apply their experience and expertise toward helping the customer meet intended targets. Once its team of specialists understands a client’s exact needs, they can engage not only the local team but also the company’s global personnel resources toward finding the perfect solution to the given problem.

As an ISO-compliant company, KAEFER operates with the highest quality standards. As a result, it has built a strong and solid reputation across all sectors in all the countries it operates within.

Over the last two years, the company has made some substantial changes to how it is approaching the Canadian market. First, management made the strategic decision to concentrate its operations in Western Canada, closing all of its branches on the Atlantic side to focus on providing its services to customers in Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan. Currently, the company is expanding investment into multiple services beyond insulation into scaffolding, painting, coating, and fireproofing.

Further, the company is making the necessary preparations to provide support to the liquefied natural gas (LNG) market in Canada. KAEFER has a solid background in the LNG field, with a long list of successful projects throughout Europe, Australia, Asia, and the United States. An Australian organization under the KAEFER umbrella specializes in LNG projects and is being called on to impart its expertise to its Canadian counterparts in this sector.

This new LNG focus may enable the company to expand into Kitimat, British Columbia. “Expansion into Kitimat is a natural path as we are looking to support the LNG business in the region. We want to expand and support other clients in that region as well. We expect, depending on the volume of business, we might even be opening a new branch there,” says Machado.

With a long history of working on LNG projects throughout the world, KAEFER can apply its international resources toward building a leading Canadian LNG solution. That level of expertise sets it apart from any other company in that sector in Canada.

LNG plants are made up of many modular components, and typically those components are built in other countries and then shipped to North America where they are first insulated and then installed. KAEFER has developed a system where all the pipes can be pre-insulated and installed in the module at the manufacturing plant so that, when it arrives in Canada, the receiving team can focus solely on installation.

This maximizes more than just the speed and efficiency of this process. Since the product is constructed in a controlled shop environment, there is much less risk of water ingress and moisture-related damage. This greatly improves the quality of the insulation and the component, and it is a major differentiator for the company, as it is a technology exclusive to KAEFER.

Several issues arise when equipment is not properly insulated, or when it corrodes underneath the insulation. Pipes and equipment surfaces can get hot enough to cause burns if a worker gets too close or comes in contact with it, plus you lose your process integrity and you pollute the environment.

KAEFER offers an energy auditing service that enables customers to recognize how they can increase the sustainability of their operation, advance safety in their facilities, and reduce their carbon footprint. An energy audit is between 80 and 100 pages, and the company has performed more than 200 of them worldwide. Often plant operators are surprised to find out how great the energy and CO₂ saving potentials are and how short the payback time is (usually less than two years).

During an energy audit, KAEFER thermographers will visit a client’s site to take thermographic pictures and measurements. KAEFER will assess the facility and provide a report with actionable advice on how to properly insulate their equipment. It includes not only the exact amounts and types of insulation they require but also an estimation of how much it will cost and how quickly it will pay off.

One of the most critical issues around insulation is a phenomenon called Corrosion Under Insulation (CUI). Due to the insulation itself and the cladding around it, you often cannot see when a pipe is corroding underneath. KAEFER offers a CUI health check service. During the check, the company will assess a number of key aspects of a business that have a direct correlation to the monitoring and handling, as well as perform risk mitigation of this problem. In order to give advice for improvement, KAEFER will analyze the customer’s internal processes, how technically competent their organization is, and how the company handles data when it finds anomalies.

“You try to find out why it’s happening, why it’s happening so often, why it’s happening in this area rather than another, and what do you do to prevent it in the future? So, we compare the inherent risks you have with the capabilities of your organization,” says Thomas-Peter Wilk, KAEFER Chief Technical Officer and Head of Corporate Innovation and Technical Excellence from the KAEFER Group headquartered in Germany. This assessment will help a company know how best to detect and handle CUI.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating effect on KAEFER Canada. The company is closely tied to the oil and gas industry, as a significant portion of its customers are either in or are connected to that space. In 2020, many of its projects were postponed or cancelled entirely and earnings dropped significantly. Luckily, 2021 has shown more promise with an increase of nearly thirty percent compared to 2019 but still far from the levels it was at before the pandemic.

As the market grows more competitive, companies will need to seek novel, technology-driven solutions to increase efficiency and reduce costs, and KAEFER’s commitment to providing competitive, high-quality industrial services continues to push it to the front of Canadian industries.

The post Innovative, Technology-Driven Solutions in the Field of Industrial Services<p class="company">KAEFER Canada Inc.</p> appeared first on Resource In Focus.

The fourth generation family company is celebrating its 110^th anniversary this year. “It started in 1910 with my great grandfather, one horse and a wagon, and we’re still here,” said Domenic Monopoli, President and CEO at Filco Carting. He attributes the company’s longstanding history of success to its capacity to adapt as the industry evolved for over a century. “Really, it’s being able to reinvent yourself every 10 to 12 years and being able to change with the environment: the business environment, the climate, the demands of the customers, and all the different types of technology,” he explained.

“That is why we formed a strategic partnership with Recycle Track Systems, Inc. (RTS),” said Monopoli. “We use their geo-tracking technology in all of our trucks. RTS’s system informs customers when our truck is near their location via SMS and email notifications. This allows the customer’s operations team to prepare their loading area and ensure security is alerted. The real-time notifications limit waiting times and eliminate the possibility of missed pick-ups, making collection much more efficient.”

Each generation of ownership at Filco had the good business sense to make new investments in modern equipment and technology that would allow the company to stay relevant and grow at a steady pace. “Generation to generation, it’s just about changing with the times, and being able to recognize what’s on the horizon to stay in front of it,” explained Monopoli.

Under the current leadership, Filco is focused on new technology and sustainability. The goal is to run the collection trucks as efficiently as possible using GPS guidance software and live cameras with audio for clear communication between employees. Several years ago, the company made the investment to replace its fleet with the safest, most modern equipment that can be found in New York City’s waste collection industry.

Safety is paramount
In the United States, solid waste collection workers have the fifth highest fatality rate of any occupation, with a higher workplace fatality rate than firefighters or police officers. Understandably, safety is a central concern for waste collection companies in any city, but operating a waste collection vehicle in a metropolitan center as populated as New York City can be extremely dangerous – particularly now, as smartphones seem to find new ways to distract us every day. Screens are designed to monopolize our attention and the number of things people use them for while driving is always growing. We use them to make phone calls, to play music, to tell us where we’re going, to order food, and so much more. The number of accidents related to distracted driving in New York has increased a staggering 86 percent since 2009 according to an article published in PR NewsWire. In order to operate safely, a thorough and well understood safety policy is absolutely required.

To alleviate some of the safety concerns and reduce the number of incidents, Filco provides extensive training to its employees in house and holds regular safety meetings throughout each month. The company uses the Smith System, a well-known set of defensive driving rules in the industry for commercial drivers. “We have our own safety school and no one goes out on a truck solo without finishing a two-week course. Then once a week, every Thursday, we do pop-up meetings or what we call tailgate meetings, and at least twice a month we have full-blown safety meetings where we bring in outside guests and speakers,” explained Monopoli. Once a year, the company also rents convention space to host a large-scale safety seminar with all of its employees, repeat customers, and a number of qualified guest speakers. “We go quite in-depth because safety, as far as I’m concerned, is extraordinarily important in our industry.”

Evolving through uncertain times
Filco has been consistently growing at a steady pace, between 10 to 15 percent a year – significant for a large company. It prioritizes smart, organic growth over rapid expansion, although the events of this year have halted many of the company’s growth plans for 2020.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Filco employed approximately 145 employees and it hopes to be operating with that number again by early next year. Some of its office staff are working from home and the others work on odd or even days, allowing only half the staff in at one time to enable social distancing.

The pandemic has created new challenges for every business, and even essential operations such as waste collection companies have had to rearrange the way they move. Luckily for Filco, the company has already proved itself capable of quickly restructuring the business when times change.

To this end, Filco immediately provided its employees with personal protective equipment to keep them safe and to decrease the chance of viruses spreading through waste disposal. Employees wear masks, gloves and outer protective garments, and the trucks are sanitized professionally in between each shift. Filco has put forward a major effort to support its employees as they put themselves on the front lines to continue to collect waste in an unpredictable environment. It is easy to become accustomed to the routine of garbage pickup and forget that these services are a necessity and the waste collection workers are truly essential frontline workers.

Another area of the business that has required temporary reorganization is Filco’s commercial office customers. As people have been forced to work from home, the garbage collection for office towers has become very minimal. “We lost probably 40 percent of our business and we’re climbing back slowly,” said Monopoli. “The office towers that we service –well over 100 – are at maybe 20 percent capacity. Restaurants are not open yet, and some hotels are functioning normally but most are not. So once again, it was just about reinventing ourselves – going from a fleet of 40 trucks down to 10 or 12, and then starting to rebuild from there.”

The challenge for Filco today is the unknown. It is unclear when or if its customers will be able to return to full capacity. There are many questions in the air and Filco is prepared to find new solutions as the industry moves forward.

It’s all about relationships
Filco Carting has always been highly customer service-oriented. Prior to the pandemic, it was servicing over 5,000 customers per day, the majority of whom were repeat customers. The company has also established close relationships with the utility companies in New York. The utilities represent the largest customers in the city, and Filco has maintained these coveted contracts with over 300 locations since 2002 because of its exceptional customer service. “It’s all about customer service; it’s responding when the customer calls and having a pleasant person answering the phone. We never have an automated recorder answer the phone during regular business hours; it’s a live person, and that was a decision that was made on purpose,” said Monopoli. Supervisors can be reached at the Filco Carting office 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and many of the larger accounts have Monopoli’s personal cell phone number.

As Filco has grown and developed, it has always strived to maintain its family-owned, friendly environment. “I have an open door policy, and every single employee has my cell phone number,” said Monopoli. “We try to grow and grow but also keep the same culture that we were brought up with.”

As proud members of the Laborers Local Union 108, Filco pays its people the highest wage in the industry and the average employee has a tenure of over 20 years. Monopoli has been a trustee of the union for the past six years and strongly believes the union is essential to represent the value of waste collection workers. “A lot of companies don’t unionize and they don’t take care of their people the right way. We are proud of the fact that we pay our people the highest wage in the industry and in the end, it pays back.”

The unpredictability of the future based on how COVID-19 will continue to affect the United States has put many businesses on hold this year. Filco has pushed back some of its plans for growth but will continue to focus on the strengths that have led to its 110 years of success.

“We’re here to stay,” concluded Monopoli. “We’re going to maintain the customer base that we have the best we can, we’re going to continue to give the best possible service at the best possible price, we’re going to run the safest fleet in the industry, we’re hiring the most capable people, and we’re very proud to be unionized.”

The post A Century-Long Tradition of Adaptation and Reinvention<p class="company">Filco Carting</p> appeared first on Resource In Focus.

Established in 1961, the group was led by various municipal managers and supervisors in southern California who were already focused on sanitation and waste collection worker safety. Originally, it was named the Governmental Refuse Collection and Disposal Association (GRCDA) and it directed most of its attention toward training and information sharing. Today, SWANA has approximately 11,000 members in 47 chapters throughout the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Basin.

Membership in SWANA comes with a diverse range of benefits for various companies and agencies affiliated with the solid waste industry. “One of the primary benefits is being part of the large SWANA community, which provides networking and information-sharing opportunities at state and provincial chapter meetings and events, national conferences such as WASTECON, and digitally through our webinars and on-line forum,” explained Biderman.

Another advantage of SWANA membership is education through industry-leading certification programs. The organization certifies more than 500 people each year and the most popular certification is the Manager of Landfill Operations (MOLO) program.

In the United States, SWANA has recently expanded its advocacy efforts in Washington, D.C. with Congress and federal agencies. Its objective is to address a wide variety of important topics impacting solid waste employers and employees, and one of the most notable of these is safety.

SWANA’s website states that solid waste collection employees have the fifth highest fatality rate in the United States. There are numerous safety hazards associated with solid waste collection, processing, and disposal such as vehicular accidents and exposure to medical waste and dangerous materials. SWANA is committed to improving safety and has developed various programs and initiatives to protect employees in the field of solid waste collection. “SWANA believes that every solid waste worker should be able to go home at the end of his or her shift safely, and that every solid waste employer has a responsibility to provide the tools and resources to help make that happen,” said Biderman.

The national epidemic of distracted driving as a result of the widespread use of cellphones has worsened the hazardous conditions for waste collectors. Over the past several decades, there has been a significant increase in the number of times a garbage collector was hit by another vehicle and that number has continued to rise. With a substantial number of collectors on the street all over the country, there is a high risk of injury or death with distracted drivers on the road. SWANA is helping to mitigate this problem through advocacy. It is pushing for states to increase the penalties against drivers who drive into collection workers or garbage trucks, similar to the heightened penalties for accidents involving emergency responders. The initiative has been successful in much of the U.S., with 30 states giving special protection to solid waste workers. These laws are known as “Slow Down to Get Around” laws, and additional information can be found on SWANA’s website: swana.org.

Other examples of SWANA’s dedication to improving safety in the solid waste industry include: providing state-of-the-art safety training at its national conferences and through its state chapters; establishing a Safety Ambassador program several years ago that appoints a safety ambassador in each SWANA chapter as a principal resource for members at the local level; hosting Hauler Safety Outreach events at disposal facilities, beginning in 2018, which provide an opportunity to reach many front-line drivers and helpers who are not SWANA members; and asking solid waste employers to take a Safety Pledge declaring they agree not to work in an unsafe manner. As of March 1, 2020, more than 3,500 people had taken the Safety Pledge. SWANA will continue to provide valuable information and resources that help to reduce fatalities, accidents, and injuries – though this goal comes with its fair share of hurdles.

One of the principal challenges facing the solid waste collection industry is that, even though it is recognized as an essential service, it is not compensated as such. If the cost of garbage collection is compared to any other utility service including electricity, cable TV, or water, garbage collection costs significantly less. For approximately 15 to 25 dollars a month, $300,000 trucks are sent to people’s homes each week to pick up and transport their waste and recycling.

COVID-19 is the latest example demonstrating how essential solid waste collection is to the public. As people quarantined themselves, garbage collection continued because otherwise it would lead to adverse public health threats. People are accustomed to paying very little for such an important service, and hopefully one silver lining to the pandemic will be an increased appreciation for the essential service of garbage collection. The maker of Glad garbage bags teamed with SWANA to develop a “Sanitation Workers Support Fund” to recognize waste collection workers and provide money to those workers who tested positive for COVID-19 or to their family if they died.

Notwithstanding COVID-19, the solid waste industry requires collectors to work in a very unpredictable environment. They work in all types of weather conditions and have no control over what is put into the trash. This is a work setting that can be challenging on a daily basis, which makes it difficult to attract and retain workers. “Although many six-year-olds are fascinated by garbage trucks, not a lot of people grow up wanting to be in the solid waste industry, so we have difficulty recruiting and retaining qualified workers, particularly as drivers or mechanics,” shared Biderman. To overcome this challenge, SWANA supports efforts in the industry to expand the use of social media to recruit younger workers. It also encourages reaching out to veterans coming out of the military who have the technical skills to operate heavy equipment.

SWANA also recently began a Young Professionals program to recruit younger employees aged 22 to 35 into the association. The concept is to make it easier for these new generations of employees to participate in the organization and give them the opportunity to network with each other. The program has grown rather rapidly and now has nearly 1000 young professionals, also known as YPs. The YPs make up nearly ten percent of the association and they are a welcome source of energy and new ideas. SWANA has also made its membership free for any full-time college student. “We want to try to attract students into our industry because it’s a terrific industry to be part of. The people are great, it’s very recession-resistant, and there’s opportunity for professional growth and success,” explained Biderman.

The International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) connects solid waste management companies and organizations around the world to resources and to each other. SWANA is the U.S. and Canadian representative for the IWSA. Outside of North America, Australia, and Europe, solid waste management is often found to be lacking in rigorous environmental, health and safety regulation. SWANA has been working closely with other members of the ISWA to implement more effective safety standards around the world.

“It’s a long-term goal of ISWA to make safety a higher profile activity of the organization and I expect that SWANA will play a leading role in helping to make that happen,” said Biderman.

Toward this goal, in early 2019 the organization applied for and was awarded a U.S. State Department grant to conduct landfill training and capacity building in Colombia. Through this effort SWANA aims to help that region bring a strong, safe regulatory structure to solid waste management. SWANA sent a team of experts to a number of Colombian landfills to assess the current operations and met with regulatory officials from all of the agencies that regulate various aspects of landfill operations in that region. A specialist was brought on to analyze the gap between Colombian and U.S. regulatory standards, and Colombian landfill operators came to the United States in November 2019 for a tour of modern American landfills and to meet with government officials. A week-long classroom training program in Bogota was scheduled to take place in June, and that will be replaced by a virtual educational program likely to occur later this summer. SWANA expects more than one hundred participants from throughout Latin America in this program, which will be free.

In December 2020, SWANA will begin to develop a new five-year strategic plan and hopes that it will be as successful as its 2015 strategic plan, which helped the organization grow from 8,200 to more than 11,000 members over five years. “The solid waste industry is always changing and SWANA continues to change as well. We are diversifying our educational offerings to provide more digital training opportunities, and updating MOLO to incorporate the latest technological and other operational innovations,” said Biderman.

The solid waste industry is often overlooked, but it should be appreciated as a critical service that is essential to the quality of life within every community all over North America. SWANA has established itself as a leader in safety and advocacy for this critical industry. As its chapters continue to expand, and its leaders fight for its members’ interests, SWANA is helping to make solid waste collection a safer and more efficient process.

“SWANA is an essential resource for the solid waste industry. Regardless of whether you work for a governmental agency, small hauler, big company, or a company that sells to the industry, you should be an active member of SWANA.”

The post Advocating for Safety in the Solid Waste Industry<p class="company">The Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA)</p> appeared first on Resource In Focus.

To offer a full range of energy efficiency solutions, PosiGen first seals the vents to perform blower door and duct blaster tests to determine how much air exchange there is between the interior and exterior of the home and how much air is escaping through the ductwork into the attic. The team then seals the building envelope and repairs the ductwork and seals, the plenum, and air return; replaces all incandescent bulbs with LEDs; installs a programmable thermostat; installs attic knee wall insulation; blows cellulose insulation into the attic; and puts an insulation sleeve on the hot water heater.

“We are working on making the house not only more energy efficient but also healthier. We’re cutting down the amount of moisture intrusion, spores, mold, dust, et cetera that comes in, making it more comfortable and getting rid of the hot and cold spots as well as the drafts,” says Neyhart.

In 2011, six years after Hurricane Katrina, residents in Louisiana continued to struggle with rebuilding their homes, and PosiGen was founded to equip these families with solar and energy efficiency programs that would have an immediate positive financial impact. At the time, solar programs were designed to help the environment or to give residents peace of mind about future payments, but not necessarily to return immediate savings. PosiGen set out to find a way for solar to put an average of $500 a year back into families’ pockets right away by combining solar and energy efficiency together.

The business tax credits and incentive programs in Louisiana enabled the company to turn this concept into a reality; however, it was challenging to explain to financial partners that the plan was to focus on deployment in low-income neighborhoods. Working with families that have lower incomes regardless of credit score did not resonate well in an industry that was already focused on serving expensive homes owned by people with credit scores of 750 or higher and household incomes of at least $150,000. “Our idea that this would be a utility replacement, that credit scores didn’t really matter, and that ‘the lower the income the better because the bigger the impact,’ just wasn’t something people were ready for at the time,” explains Neyhart.

As part of a team effort to address the challenge of raising initial capital, PosiGen Co-Founder Aaron Dirks joined the effort, and the company was able to borrow funds from a local bank to go out and install a few hundred systems. PosiGen was able to prove that there is indeed a high demand in this underserved population, and that there is a great amount of immediate savings possible. In some of the older homes, the solar and energy efficiency solutions provided up to $1,000 in annual net savings for those customers.

PosiGen’s success attracted the attention of US Bank, which has a background in community development, and it provided the emerging company with its first injection of “tax equity” (that is, investment dollars associated with the federal 30 percent solar Investment Tax Credit). From that point on, business took off and has not slowed down since. “We went from installing maybe 500 systems in 2012 to installing over 1,500 systems in 2013 and over 2,000 systems in 2014 – and we’ve never looked back,” says Neyhart. To date, the company has served 14,000 families, and over 70 percent of its solar installations are still performed in low-income census tracts. Fortunate to find great financial partners along the way, PosiGen is grateful for its relationships with LibreMax, Capital One, GAF, Callais Capital, Connecticut Green Bank, and others.

These partnerships have allowed PosiGen to accelerate its growth in Louisiana, Connecticut, and New Jersey, and to continue helping the families and communities that need it most. “If you make 30,000 dollars a year and have three kids in school, and we can put $500 to $700 a year back into your pocket, that 50 or 60 dollars a month has a real impact when it goes toward buying school supplies or groceries,” says Neyhart.

Make no mistake, PosiGen is a for-profit company with stockholders, and it is concerned with ROI, but it is a firm that lives by its mission, which includes four pillars, starting with not only making a positive financial impact on the future of families’ lives but also making a positive financial impact in the broader community.

To this end, PosiGen has installed 2,790 systems in New Orleans East, and the average customer in that neighborhood is now saving approximately $52 a month. That money does not go into a 401(k) or into a stock portfolio; instead, it is spent in the neighborhood at the local grocery store, pharmacy, or the cleaners. “Economists say every dollar that is spent in a low-income community churns 3.9 times, and when you multiply that by 2,790 families and multiply it by 12 months, all of a sudden you see that PosiGen is having a $6,000,000 a year impact on the New Orleans East community, which is a very low-income census tract,” explains Neyhart.

Roughly 42 percent of the business at PosiGen comes from customer referrals, as people have a tendency to discuss the positive changes in their lives and want to help their community.

PosiGen is also creating jobs and business opportunities in low income communities, which is the basis of the third pillar of its mission: to hire the same people it serves. Over 65 percent of its employees are persons of protected class and in many cases, its customers choose to apply for work at PosiGen after their homes see the benefit of solar installations and energy efficiency upgrades. During employee meetings, when the question is asked, half of the room raises their hand to state that they had been a customer before coming to work for the company. Dedicated to paying its people a living wage, PosiGen offers a competitive starting wage, pays 75 percent of all employee benefits, and matches employee contributions to their 401(k) plan dollar for dollar. The company is proud to state that its employees have collectively saved over $3,000,000 for their own futures.

The fourth pillar of PosiGen’s mission takes employment one step further by building strong and reliable career opportunities for staff. One team member, Caitlin, began in the telemarketing department before working her way up to Team Lead and moving into an administrative role. She then became involved in marketing and ultimately became the Marketing Manager for the entire company across all three states with an annual budget of close to $2,000,000 to manage.

PosiGen also helps to create career opportunities in the community by working with at-risk youth each year through its summer internship program. Students learn about the company’s mission in a classroom setting as well as on site and in the end, one is selected for a scholarship award.

Thanks to its financial partners, PosiGen expects to see a large increase in the number of families it will be able to serve this year. The company is currently working to raise additional corporate equity to further its growth and create partnerships that will allow it to service low-income communities in other states. This is key, as PosiGen believes that reducing energy costs for low-income families should be a focus for the renewable industry in every state. It is easy to sell expensive solar products to the wealthy, but the positive effects of serving “underinvested communities” are undeniably beneficial to society as a whole.

“The amount of deployable solar in the U.S. on low-income homeowners’ houses is 342 gigawatts,” says Neyhart. “Think about the impact that would have across the nation if we could figure out a program that would consistently be able to deliver solar and energy efficiency to these customers.” The efficient cost structure at PosiGen enables it to install a solar system that is cash flow positive on day one and this is a concept that should be adopted by more solar companies. PosiGen’s customer acquisition costs are $4,500 lower than the industry average, and its installation costs are $3,000 dollars less than average, making its model very accessible.

PosiGen is always on the lookout for emerging innovative technology to broaden its offering and save its customers the most amount of money possible. “We always say, ‘we don’t have to make every dollar, but we have to save our customers every dollar,’” says Neyhart. PosiGen has proven that the concept of supplying solar to low-income homeowners is profitable, and it has developed a model worth emulating. “You hate to ask for competitors, but we can’t be everywhere, and this program needs to be available for everybody out there.”

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