Eco BCG
Re-engineering plants to help big business be sustainable.
In 2009, Sergio Castillo stepped out of a corporate career in manufacturing with 3M to take over Eco BCG, the consultancy his father had started a decade before. After a time, Castillo, 54, concluded that the company was in the wrong country (Panama), the wrong market (South America), and the wrong business (consulting). So he reincorporated in Minnesota as a solutions-oriented engineering company, and set out to crack the $358 billion engineering services market. He’s grown his company to $4.2 million in annual revenue by helping multinationals solve a nagging issue with their grandiose plans for sustainability—namely, getting their own manufacturing plants on board.
“Sustainability is difficult to deploy. Why? Because each plant is independent. They have priorities around productivity, quality, and safety, but not necessarily sustainability. Corporations have quite a hard time, and that’s where we come in.
Our customers today include the top distilleries, such as Beam Suntory, and breweries, such as Heineken. We’re working with the top snack producers worldwide, PepsiCo and Mondelēz. At the beginning, there was so much competition.
Our first step, as a company, was to understand that all major corporations need to be sustainable. They have aggressive targets around carbon emission reduction, carbon neutrality, and so forth. And typically they are public, so there is pressure because they’ll be held to account.
We were founded as a consulting firm, in 2000, in Panama; that’s where my father is from. He was consulting on sustainability, on a macroeconomic level, for countries like Brazil. I took over in 2009, leaving a 3M spinoff where I was a general manager and vice president of our global division.
After I took over Eco BCG, I restructured it and realigned it, taking it away from consulting and more into execution. In 2014, we decided to move the company to the United States, developing our market here, which was hard. It’s rosy now, but it was quite difficult then. There are 138,000 engineering firms in the U.S. How do you break in? To gain a little bit more knowledge, I went back to school; I took a master’s in environmental management at Duke University.
One of our biggest strengths is that we align stakeholders. We help them improve and optimize the processes and at the same time justify the projects with savings in energy, water, and emissions and increased productivity.
It all starts with the general manager. The general manager of a manufacturing plant is compensated on the basis of productivity, quality, and safety. Those are the three priorities for all plants. Yes, other things are important, like efficiency, supply chains, and of course cost, but the general manager is focused on those three. So then there comes a target, led by corporate, to reduce emissions or energy intensity or water usage by, let’s say, 20 percent. Well, that’s not as important to a general manager. We get them to buy in.
Here’s an example. One of our clients— one of the biggest food companies in the world—runs very large tunnel ovens, in this case to bake breadcrumbs. And the ovens were not meeting the product specs—not giving the quality that the company needed. We came in to look at the ovens through sustainability, and we created a heat recovery system. Basically, the ovens were venting hot air and then taking fresh air in and heating flue gases. We put in a heat exchanger to take the air coming out of the stack to preheat it going into the ovens. By preheating the air, we increased their moisture extraction capacity, which is important in making breadcrumbs. We were able to reduce the use of natural gas by over 50 percent and shut down more than half of the burners, improving output by 1,000 tons with a better product.
And we have experienced engineers in other countries, allowing us to provide international support for our customers, which are global. In Europe, for instance, there’s much more experience in heat recovery than there is here.
We’re actually the second company in my family to reach the Inc. 5000. My wife owned a logistics planning services business that made the Inc. 5000 six years in a row until she sold it. She’s an entrepreneur too. It runs in the family.”
How I Make Sustainability Work for Big Corporations