Environmental Progress - Winter 2000

Environmental Management:
A New Perspective

Zexel USA Corporation

Decatur

Zexel USA manufactures components and systems for automotive air conditioning; the Decatur facility manufactures the compressors and evaporator cores. Two Zexel facilities obtained ISO 14000 certification in June of 1998 (Decatur and one in Texas) with work underway at their facility in Arcola.

It’s probably an understatement that most companies would prefer not to be visited by Illinois EPA inspectors, but Zexel invited more than 100 inspectors into their Decatur facility. The occasion was the Agency’s Pollution Prevention (P2) workshops for field office staff, during which six groups of inspectors, over a period of three Fridays, walked through the plant, asked tough questions and made suggestions for P2 improvements to Zexel staff.

The final result was a long list of pollution prevention suggestions for the company to evaluate and a lot of practical P2 experience for Agency staff. Many of the suggestions have been investigated and implemented by Zexel since their “inspection en masse.”

One of Zexel’s P2 projects has been to maximize the energy efficiency of their brazing furnaces by shutting off the heat on one while the other is in use. The heat of brazing furnaces produces the important seal between the plates of evaporator cores. In the past, both of the two brazing furnaces were kept running in case of breakdown but the company has come up with a way to run only one with the other maintained in a state of quick start-up, if needed. The second furnace would run when Furnace No. 1 was down for clean-out. Benefits include cost savings by reducing energy consumption. In the first month, a savings of more than $20,000 was realized.

In addition, Zexel set a goal of using more environmentally friendly paper products, fully expecting it to be more costly than their previous paper products. American consumers have been slow to accept recycled content paper products, citing concerns about poor quality and higher price, which creates a disincentive to paper collection and recycling programs that in turn results in the waste of natural resources.

In 1998, Ernie Marsh, Zexel’s maintenance manager, worked with their supplier to compare prices of the white paper towels (c-fold), brown roll paper towels and toilet tissue that they had been purchasing with products containing more than 20 percent recycled content (the roll towels are 70 percent post-consumer content). All three passed quality trials and, instead of costing more, are saving the company $1,704 per year.

Only the environmentally friendly products are in use today, demonstrating that environmental improvement can be good for a company’s bottom line!