Our World and Everything in It

 

I recently watched Planet Green’s presentation about Contessa Foods developing a green frozen food manufacturing plant. It’s the only such plant awarded a LEED award by the US Green Building Council. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design or LEED is a third party certification program and nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of high performance green buildings.

 

This plant was designed to conserve as much as possible and as a result, Contessa Foods cut both their energy consumption and related emissions by 50% within one year. 

 

Now if Contessa can do this within a year, why can’t everyone figure out ways to really lower their consumption of energy? It is the easiest and most prudent thing to do right now. We have high gas prices and want to drill yet we’ve hardly scratched the surface at conservation. Speed limits haven’t been lowered, people haven’t even been told to stop running outdoor lights. We did these things without a whole lot of griping in the 70’s, but now we have the audacity to just demand more without cutting back first. Remember the years no one had Christmas lights around their houses? You were the bad guy if you put them up.

 

Contessa Foods is a good guy. According to Contessa’s CEO, John Z. Bazevich,  “Until now, the USGBC has never LEED-certified a frozen-food manufacturing facility. As a leader in our industry, we didn’t wait for environmental standards to be established. Instead, we collaborated with LEED and decided to raise the bar for the entire industry and to do the right thing for the long-term sustainability of our environment.” Attaboy!

 

Imagine if all manufacturing had that attitude? Think of the money they could save too.

Contessa stands out in 5 areas of the LEED rating system with:

 

• A solar-power array that reduces carbon dioxide emissions by more than 730,000 pounds each year, producing an effect similar to conserving 276 acres of pine forest – roughly the size of 209 football fields, including end zones – each year.
• A heat-recovery system that captures waste heat from the refrigeration system and redirects it to preheat water for the plant’s boilers.
• Variable frequency drives that adjust the amount of power supplied to motors at specific times or under specific conditions to minimize energy use.
• An innovative loading dock that prevents the loss of refrigerated air, reducing temperature fluctuation – and energy use – in the loading dock area.

 

What I saw on TV was an impeccably clean plant where all the rooms within are distinctly cut off from the others, the idea being to keep heat with heat and cold with cold.

 

Their motto at Contessa: “Reduce, Redirect, and Reuse. It’s a good model to follow for sure.

 

Read more about what Contessa accomplished:

http://myseafoodshow08.bdmetrics.com/portal/ViewPressRelease.aspx?id=35922&cid=4217488

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Conservation, Energy, Environmentalism, Food, Green Construction, Methods for Lowering Energy Costs, Solar Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.