Environmental Grants Help Cut Energy Costs

By: Mark Fitzgerald It may not be easy being green, but don't tell that to Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. (PNI). Its Schuylkill Printing Plant recycles everything from the silver in its platemaking process to forklift batteries. Since 1998, it has been a zero-discharge facility, meaning it no longer pumps any wastewater from its manufacturing processes into the sewers of Upper Merion Township.

But thanks to an anti-pollution grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News is also uncovering potentially significant energy savings. Pennsylvania is paying 80% of the cost, up to a maximum $15,000, of hiring Compliance Management International (CMI), a Montgomeryville, Pa., firm, to search the plant for potential anti-pollution and energy-saving measures.

After touring the Schuylkill plant in October, DEP Secretary David E. Hess declared that if PNI implemented all the measures identified by the state agency, it could shave more than $125,000 off its power bills.

That estimate, in fact, now looks to be on the low side. Michelle Donohue, PNI's environmental-affairs manager, says that, after just eight hours, CMI found "six-figure savings" in energy-conservation measures alone -- an amount that doubled after another eight-hour inspection.

CMI says fixing the leaking couplings on the air compressors used by its nine printing presses, for example, would save nearly 2,377,080 kilowatt-hours of electricity every year -- a savings equivalent to $118,854. (PNI began the work this month.) CMI also says retrofitting light fixtures in the production area would not only improve lighting but also cut the electricity bill by $10,033 annually.

The Pennsylvania DEP program is one of many offered by states, utilities, and the federal government. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Green Lights program is a real money saver, says Keith Mask, director of energy conservation for Cox Enterprises Inc. "Even in economic bad times, it has a two-year payback. You're foolish not to take advantage of it," Mask says. Green Lights provides technical assistance to businesses changing their lighting, and the EPA says participants, on average, are cutting their lighting bills nearly in half.

The Muscatine (Iowa) Journal recently took advantage of free energy audits offered by its local power company under a state law. The new lights paid for themselves in energy savings within nine months, Publisher Mark Roby says. And, he adds, workers in the paper's 80-year-old building aren't working in the dark as a result: "Interestingly, the biggest complaint I've gotten is the brightness of the lights, and we've actually reduced the number of lights in one part [of a production area] from 12 to six."

The key to the newspaper's energy savings was switching from incandescent bulbs -- which transform 80% of their energy into heat and only 20% into light -- to modern, compact fluorescent bulbs, which use energy in the opposite way, reducing the need for air conditioning in the summer.

"Normally, at a business I can find a reduction of at least a month's worth of electricity bills," says John Root, energy-services adviser for Muscatine Power and Water. "At the Journal, we identified a potential $4,000 a year in savings ... and so far with what they've implemented, they have saved $1,890."

The best part of the whole deal, he reports, is the amount of carbon dioxide that "hasn't gone into the atmosphere" as a result of the paper's new energy-saving measures -- 37 tons.

For more information on newspapers' efforts to conserve energy, please see Mark Fitzgerald's in-depth feature.