We listened in on a webinar, “Low Cost Measures for Improving Sustainability,” that we thought was worth sharing as yet another major seafood company is taking advantage of the race to green up. (In case you’ve missed our past blog along these lines, you might want to check out our work with Chicken of the Sea.)
Seachill is a salmon and whitefish company that operates out of a large facility with around 550 employees. While Seachill can pride itself on such a successful operation, Seachill’s major customers made it apparent that the switch to more sustainable practices would be a necessary one. Keeping the environment and global impacts in mind, Seachill decided to embark on a journey that would end up saving them a significant amount of money. The company broke their road to sustainable practices down into four categories: waste, energy, water, and carbon emissions. Before making the cognitive decision to further analyze these areas, Seachill had no idea just how much waste they were producing in all fields.
Waste: Initially Seachill admits that they just had someone come and take their waste away every week to a landfill. But when their carrier went out of business in 2011, they decided to start segregating their waste on site. This led to a recycling operation which would target everything from gloves and boots that employees could no longer use, to the cardboard boxes that goods were transported in. While recycling used to be a low order concern, Seachill can now confidently boast recycling about 90% of their waste!
Energy: Seachill was once a very high energy consumer, but now they are working to introduce energy saving measures such as improved efficiency machines and motion sensors. The company admits that originally they simply left the lights on 24 hours a day, a sin many companies are guilty of. But now Seachill is saving about four thousand dollars a year in energy expenses!
Water: Being a wet fish factory meant that Seachill consumed about four hundred tons of water in a single day on primarily washing and rinsing fish. But with improved machinery, Seachill has reduced their water bill by about five thousand dollars a year!
Looking to the future, Seachill’s Health and Safety Manager, Mike Evans, hopes to devote a significant amount of time assessing the company’s carbon footprint and getting rid of extraneous usage. During the webinar he stated, “Once we put all of the little bits and pieces together in this jigsaw puzzle of trying to save energy, we are looking at saving the business, certainly by the end of this year, about 70k a year!”
The webinar also reviewed how Seachill introduced waste segregation and turned recycling from being a cost to a revenue stream; which materials lent themselves readily to recycling; and how Seachill is applying the same low cost approach to tackling energy consumption. Learn more by checking out the complete webinar recording here!