Gail Nickel-Kailing: Hi, I’m Gail Nickel-Kailing, WhatTheyThink Going Green, and I’m here today with Jack Johnson from Brown Printing and Brown Printing is the winner of the WhatTheyThink Environmental Innovation Award for Process. So, Jeff, I would really like you to tell me about your energy star challenge and how that’s helping you move your green initiatives forward.
Jack Johnson: Okay, definitely. As far as reducing the carbon footprint, what we’ve done, we’ve used both technologies and installed some projects, but more importantly, to deliver meaningful impact to the bottom line, what we’ve done is we’ve educated the employees and got all the employees aware of ways to save energy. It’s been an important part of that challenge. And it starts out slow, but as they find that out quickly, everything from turning off the lights to turning down the thermostats, it doesn’t have to be high tech, simply just working to reduce our carbon footprint and our energy usage and it’s been significant in 2009.
Gail Nickel-Kailing: So are you doing something with the physical plant as well to reduce energy in the physical plant itself?
Jack Johnson: Yes. We have a combination of projects. Regenerative thermal oxidizers, our RTOs to reduce natural gas usage. We’ve upgraded all of our boiler burners for high efficiency burning and seen cuts of 20 or 30 percent in our gas usage. And then also incorporating some building management systems as well. So technology and conservation both.
Gail Nickel-Kailing: So when you look at that combination and you look back at 2009, can you really pinpoint what the effect was on your total energy use? Is there a percentage you can hang on that?
Jack Johnson: Yes, definitely. When we looked at it with, we’ve been a member of Energy Star, and what we’ve actually done, because as with the printing industry, it’s been a very changing and dynamic industry during the last couple of years. So we did tracking of our energy by usage per impression, per impressions produced. And have tracked that to be assured that we are actually saving energy, even when we maybe producing less or more in any particular months and we’ve actually seen a reduction of seven and a half percent in 2009.
Gail Nickel-Kailing: Congratulations.
Jack Johnson: So we’re excited about that and looking forward to continuing that on. So.
Gail Nickel-Kailing: Great. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Jack Johnson: Thank you.
Gail Nickel-Kailing: Thank you.