The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Businesses focus on sustaining, less waste
For many Lorain County businesses, the answer to cost reduction and improving energy efficiency is often an update in technology and selling recyclable material.
Businesses like Pro HVAC/R Services, Inc. and Ely Enterprises, Inc. are some of the local options that either smaller momand-pop or larger corporate businesses have to purchasing equipment that will reduce energy consumption and make their efforts more eco-friendly.
Especially for businesses with waste — including everything from cardboard to tires — the ability to compress, sell and recycle waste can be a game changer, according to Ely Enterprises president Kenneth Ely.
His recycling equipment supplier, which has been open for 38 years and moved from Cleveland to Lorain in 2008, helps these businesses get into the recycling game by selling new and used balers, shredders and conveyors among other equipment as well as parts. It also provides repair services.
Ely said the equipment provided by the supplier services 80 percent of the county, mainly providing recycling balers to a variety of organizations and businesses, from Honda and Toyota factories and Republic Services to supermarkets and food banks.
By compacting and selling unneeded materials, Ely said densification can help with disposal of the material, even if it’s not recyclable.
For instance, tires that are baled can be dug out of landfills when technology allows for their recycling.
“It’s cost avoidance,” he said on the pros of baling. “It avoids landfill disposal fees and generates revenue because they sell that material.”
Steel is also a popular material that is often baled, particularly with automotive plants, according to Ely.
When hoods, doors and other parts of a vehicle are stamped out of steel at a local Honda plant, excess bits are put through the baler and come out in 80to 100-pound bales the size of shoe boxes.
Bales are then shipped to a manufacturing plant in Anna, where the steel is melted down into new engine blocks or sold to the open market, Ely said.
“You’re saving natural resources,” he said. “You’re avoiding landfill disposal and you’re recycling products that would go to a landfill and you’re reusing them. It’s the whole recycling loop.”
Cardboard boxes and other recyclable material are baled by supermarkets and grocers like Discount Drug Mart and Target.
Additionally, recycling is also able to save energy and space in landfills, which in turn reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
Recycling one ton of paper saves 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space, according to a 2012 Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, Inc. Scrap Yearbook.
By recycling four tires, the equivalent of 323 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions is saved, the report said.
A recycled car is as much as 8,811 pounds of emissions.
Keeping it cool
Professional HVAC/R of Avon Lake has taken to environmentally friendly technology with its natural refrigerants, sold to businesses using commercial refrigeration.
The company’s CEO, Joe Kokinda, said the green initiative was started around 2006 or 2007 with the motive to reduce energy consumption and reduce global warming potential.
The company is testing out new technology and fixtures for refrigerated display cases and walk in coolers and freezers to maintain air flow.
New self-contained equipment, which has no exterior piping and are stored in a pull-out drawer under the unit, now release smaller amounts of refrigerant.
“Fixtures that we have produce the same amount of refrigerated effect for one-third of the cost of a normal system that you would see in any supermarket because they’re self contained,” Kokinda said.
Kokinda said Pro HVAC/R goes on between 400 and 550 installations a year and provides refrigeration to both local and larger chain businesses like Dollar Tree and Family Dollar.
“If it’s got refrigeration in it, Pro HVAC probably has put it in,” he said.
Another aspect that has been included in the company’s services is energy monitoring, sub metering and thermal imaging to determine current energy consumption rates of businesses, which is part of Pro HVAC’s Pro Green Technologies branch.
“If they don’t know how much electricity they’re using, how can we compare what we put in to what they had?” Kokinda said.
For instance, updated refrigerator installations at Oberlin IGA has saved the grocer 38% on a monthly basis on electric and gas consumption, according to Kokinda.
“One of the things that we’re trying to do is make it easy for the marketers to decide on total cost of ownership,” he said. “That’s the number one thing. Yes, being green is of course the game and that’s how we get there.”
With 53.6% of an average grocery and convenience store’s energy use being from refrigeration, the investment in updated refrigeration technology can make a difference in a business’s total costs, according to Kokinda.
Food bank impact
One organization that has worked with both Pro HVAC and Ely Enterprises is Second Harvest Food Bank of North Central Ohio, which has taken steps to reduce carbon footprint and energy consumption.
President and CEO Julie Chase-Morefield said the initiative to go more green has largely been through the ideas proposed by volunteers at the food bank.
“There’s really a sense of people trying to understand what isn’t good for the environment,” she said.
Chase-Morefield said the food bank attempts to keep food and other material waste low, while using a baler to pack and sell paper and cardboard waste from shipment packaging.
“Every day we really try hard to keep down solid waste and to recycle cardboard and plastic,” she said.
Over the past 11 months, the food bank has discarded 286,000 pounds from a total of 9 million pounds of food.
Of those 286,000 pounds, Chase-Morefield said 130,000 has spoiled, half of which is able to be recycled.
Food waste is also composted or sold to farmers as animal feed.
The food bank has also stopped using paper cups and has purchased reusable mugs for its employees and is also looking into eliminating plastic bag purchases.
“If they don’t know how much electricity they’re using, how can we compare what we put in to what they had?”
— Professional HVAC/R of Avon Lake CEO Joe Kokinda