The internal annual Environmental Sustainability Best of the Best award program, now in its 11th year, recognizes teams for their achievements in reducing environmental impacts.
The Austin Plant team’s winning project focused on the design and installation of the most efficient heat recovery system available to meet the plant’s needs, which resulted in an annual energy savings of 101,000 MMBtu and an additional 17 million gallons of water.
“Our companywide Environmental Sustainability Best of the Best program drives results and helps us achieve our environmental goals to reduce water use, air emissisions, solid waste sent to landfills and nonrenewable energy use by 10 percent by 2020,” said Tom Raymond, director of environmental sustainability. “Each year, our locations implement projects that deliver outstanding results, and this year was no exception. Congratulations to the Austin Plant for their winning project and thank you to everyone who participated!”
“When the company’s 2020 environmental sustainability goals were developed, we knew our plant played a key role in achieving these results for the company. By using a competition to help drive these results, the competitive nature of our employees really shines,” said Brandon Espe, project engineer at the Austin Plant. “Hormel Foods does a fantastic job of recognizing all the participants and hard work that has gone into these sustainability projects and continues to invest time and money to show just how important environmental sustainability really is.”
The other finalists in the company’s 2018 competition included the company’s Ceratti (San Paulo, Brazil) team for their project that reduced boiler emissions, the Don Miguel Foods (Dallas, Texas) team for their water pretreatment improvements project and the Osceola (Iowa) Food team for their wastewater organic loading reduction project.
The Austin Plant team was named the champion by a panel of judges at the company’s Corporate Office in Austin, Minn., based on the criteria of project scope and goal setting, team work, project solving, achievement and savings. In total, 41 projects were entered in the competition, which documented these annual savings: over 62 million gallons of water, 146,000 MMBtu and 359 tons of solid waste.
For more information about the company’s environmental stewardship efforts, please visit https://www.hormelfoods.com/global-impact/.
