Coatings Manufacturer: Clean production techniques reduce hazardous chemical use

Ensuring that production is both “clean and lean” is a powerful way to gain both business and environmental value. It can also be a critical early step on the path to a more comprehensive sustainability strategy.

Pure Strategies brought clean production techniques to a Massachusetts-based coating manufacturer striving to reduce costly cleaning steps using a variety of environmentally harmful chemicals.

Cutting to the Quick

Pure Strategies examined the company's various loading, mixing, reacting, filtering, transferring, packaging, and cleaning operations to find opportunities to reduce cost, increase throughput, and improve environmental performance. Pure Strategies used the following total quality management tools in its analysis of the coating production and cleaning process:

• Process mapping
• Materials efficiency teams
• Statistically designed experiments
• Activity-based cost accounting
• Goal setting and tracking methods

Major Savings

As a result of these efforts, the company redesigned equipment and procedures to eliminate the need for cleaning, increased solvent reuse, and placed controls on solvent distribution and application throughout the site. Hazardous cleaning chemical use was reduced by 50%. Electricity costs to run the firm's solvent distillation unit were reduced by 60%. The company saved more than $20,000 annually. Over thirty worker-identified changes to cleaning practices were implemented as a result of the project.