As the call for green technology swells, tech firms devote time & talent to sustainability

“Sustainability is a growing aspect of virtually every engineering field. It’s trying to achieve the best value with the smallest impact on the planet.”
– Dr Lisa Shaffer, U CaliforniaSan Diego

“A lot of corporations and cities would benefit from a sustainability strategy.”
– Andrea Ramage, CH2M Hill

By Laurel A. McKee Ranger
Contributing Editor

It’s increasingly obvious that we must moderate our impact on the environment or risk our own survival. Green engineering and green technology seek to maintain a balance between technological advances
and the environment. As we attempt the difficult transition to a carbon-neutral economy, engineering
will help take us there.

Lisa Shaffer, PhD, is executive director of the campus-wide sustainability solutions institute of the University of California San Diego. She thinks the major problem is the “big-picture issue” of climate change and its various manifestations. But the more immediate issue is water.

“There are concerns about too much water and too little water. In developing countries, clean water is a major concern,” Dr Shaffer says. “In California, 19 percent of our electricity use goes to procure, transport, treat and pump water.” Shaffer has spent much of her career in Washington, DC working with NASA, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, and private-sector companies.

Rethinking everything
The issue is not simply reducing energy consumption or producing more energy from renewable sources. A “green” approach involves actually rethinking the way we do most things, from manufacturing processes to packaging materials. Fortunately, many of these concepts make sense not only from the environmental viewpoint but also from a business perspective.

Companies are putting green technology in place in many different areas, Shaffer notes. Coca-Cola, for example, has added software to the controls in its bottling plants so the compressors only draw power during the actual bottling run. Target, the huge retail corporation, has installed a system that can monitor and control temperature and lighting in all its stores nationwide from a central point, says Shaffer. Sensors can monitor energy use and efficiency in a building or on a manufacturing line.

Improving the waste stream
Another area for improvement is the waste stream. The more that can be diverted for a secondary use, the less waste. In some cases a product can be recycled and eliminated
from the waste stream entirely.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego are looking to replace Styrofoam packaging with felt. Processed felt can be shaped to protect fragile items during shipping,
then reprocessed into another shape. The electronics industries are looking at ways to
employ “gray” reused water rather than drinking-grade water in manufacturing processes.

“Sustainability is a growing aspect of virtually every engineering field,” says Shaffer. “It’s a matter of the values you bring to the engineering task. It’s trying to achieve the best value
with the smallest impact on the planet.”

Green jobs growing
Shaffer expects that green jobs will grow for every type of engineer, from materials scientists to EEs and MEs. But not every organization is ready for sustainability, she notes. “You have to make the cost/benefit case; it can be a challenge to existing corporate cultures.

“Making the business case involves calculating the return on investment. But if you look at the right time horizon, you can make the case in virtually all situations,” she says.

Michael Rojas: energy management at LA’s Metropolitan Water District
At the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA), Michael Rojas leads the overall energy management program in addition to his job as a design unit manager. Once potential projects have been identified, they are assigned to specific design teams and project managers.

The water district’s main job is importing water from the Colorado River on the eastern border of California, and from Northern California through the State Water Project. The water is conveyed across the desert and through the mountains. Metropolitan then treats and distributes it over an area from Ventura to San Diego counties.

“It takes a lot of energy to move water,” says Rojas. “We try to pump as little as possible. Wherever possible we use gravity.”

Rojas heads up a unit in the engineering services section. He has six managers who are direct reports and about a hundred staff members; the group produces drawings and engineering specs for construction and modification of pipelines, water treatment facilities and related projects involved with potable water.

“We have always focused on creating the most efficient designs, but in 2006 we began looking beyond that to reducing the carbon footprint of our operations,” Rojas explains.

In the early 1980s Metropolitan started building hydroelectric plants to capture the energy when water pressure had to be reduced. The energy produced is sold to power the grid. There are currently sixteen of these hydroelectric plants.

There is more energy to be captured as the water moves from its highest point to sea level in LA, a drop of several hundred feet. “We’ve been looking at ways to expand our hydro plants,” Rojas discloses.

His group is also considering carbon-related emissions that could be offset. “We’re looking to implement more hydro, solar and wind projects. We have one solar energy plant online with
1-MW annual capacity. And we own a lot of land along the aqueduct that might have the potential to produce wind energy.”

Rojas received his BSME from Texas A&M in 1982 and an MS in systems management from
the University of Southern California in 1990. He joined Metropolitan in 1993, when he started working in engineering QA. He moved to the ME design branch in 1996, and took over the design unit manager job in 2001.

Before Metropolitan Rojas worked for McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing, as a process engineer, then a line and project manager. His success and dedication to his work at Metropolitan led to his selection as a HENAAC role model in this year.

Rojas enjoys his work. “It’s trying to make a positive impact on mitigating climate changes.
We do whatever we can to reduce that impact or adapt to it. There’s a sense of being part
of a bigger issue.”

Sachin Pradhan: project delivery at American Water
Sachin Pradhan is an engineer in the project delivery group at the Indiana subsidiary of American Water (AW, Voorhees, NJ). The company provides both water and wastewater services.

“We are the largest investor-owned water and wastewater utility company in the country,” Pradhan notes with pride. “We treat and deliver water directly to customers and also deliver treated water in bulk to some communities. We own, operate and maintain surface-water and well-water treatment facilities.”

Pradhan’s job begins with detailed design work. When the design is complete he develops the bid documents, sends them out to contractors, and analyzes the bids to make sure they meet company standards.

When the bid is awarded he oversees construction, ordering materials and making sure the project is on schedule and within budget and specs. Then he collects the as-built documents
to update company records. If a consultant has been brought in to detail the design, Pradhan oversees that, too.

Pradhan was born in India and grew up there. After he completed his 2004 BS in construction engineering at the University of Mumbai he came to the U.S. for a 2006 MS in environmental engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

His masters thesis was on developing industrial hydrologic footprints. “Pumping and compressors account for almost all the electricity used in water and wastewater systems in
the U.S. It’s a big part of the water facilities cost,” he notes.

At the February 2009 conference of the American Water Works Association’s Indiana section, Pradhan spoke about quantifying the carbon footprint for the West Lafayette, IN AW facilities. “The study showed that electricity is the biggest contributor to total greenhouse gas emissions in our industry, although they’re considered indirect emissions because they are generated by electricity providers. In West Lafayette it represented 95 percent,” he says.

American Water’s environmental stewardship activities include conducting energy audits and improving energy efficiency, Pradhan explains. “We’re looking at replacing some pumps and motors with more efficient units and using high-efficiency lighting. We’re looking at the whole lifecycle cost.”

Pradhan is working with the director of engineering on the audit, and also with ops and maintenance personnel. “We’re hoping to present the findings at the next AWWA Indiana section conference,” he says.

The most challenging part of Pradhan’s work is project management. “I was fresh out of
school and was given a multimillion-dollar project to manage. I had to learn how to deal with contractors and consulting firms.

“Every project I do is something new, and I like that, but the initial learning curve was steep!” He also likes that the work he’s doing will help in the future. “Sustainability is fulfilling your needs without sacrificing those of future generations. It just makes sense,” Pradhan concludes.

Diversity and opportunity at AWW
Sean G. Burke, HR SVP, says that at American Water, “We see diversity as a vital element
in creating an environment where differences are regarded as important to the company’s success. We strive to reflect the local communities we serve through the people we employ.”

Linda Stillman, HR director at American Water, adds that the company is actively hiring in all categories. “We have openings in field jobs, engineering jobs and more.”

The company is looking for CEs and EnvEs. Experience with water or wastewater is a plus,
of course, and a strong construction management background can be important for some positions.

“Our locations across the country provide a lot of opportunity to move up, and we offer succession planning and developmental programs,” Stillman notes.

Julie Porter: green tires at Bridgestone
Julie Porter is a product-planning manager in the tire operating unit at Bridgestone (Nashville, TN). She works on new product development from the marketing side, doing business analysis and deciding what new products should be launched into the market and when that should happen. She’s responsible for winter tires, mass market tires, touring products and the new eco products.

“We’re just introducing our first green tire, the Ecopia EP-100,” Porter discloses. Focused on low rolling resistance, the new tire needs less energy to get moving and stay moving: as much as a 3 to 4 percent fuel savings compared with mass market tires, and better by 7 percent at wet stopping.

There’s more than the EP-100 in Bridgestone’s green initiative. Company stores also recycle the old tires that are brought in, Porter notes. “Our goal is to have zero landfill use. A lot of our tires are used in cement kilns to make asphalt, and also as fuel to heat the kilns.”

Porter’s department decides the performance characteristics and focus of a new tire. “We help select the tread design and compounds involved. We worked with the tire design engineers to make decisions on the Ecopia, and we’re involved in testing as well.” Ecopia is essentially a summer tire, but in warmer climates it can be used all year, she says.

Porter has a 1998 BSIE from the University of Tennessee. In school she was a member of SWE and the Institute of Industrial Engineers and president of the student engineering council.

She had two internships in school, with Siemens Industrial Automation working on a printed circuit-board line, and doing time studies for a sign manufacturer. She started at Bridgestone right after graduation.

“I was in more traditional engineering at first. I worked on scheduling tire production and going through the development and qualification process that’s necessary before mass production.

“When an opening came up in marketing I took it because I wanted to get into actual product planning. It was a jump to take a marketing role, but I still work with a lot of engineers. I simplify the technology for our dealers and wholesalers and I do testing. I really enjoy it; particularly working on a green tire and learning about all the initiatives.”

In her spare time Porter goes hiking with her husband, and she’s just completed her first triathlon.

Diversity and opportunity at Bridgestone
Fran Jones, director of talent management and diversity at Bridgestone, says that while the company is currently in a hiring freeze, she’s sure that farther out the need for engineers and IT pros in green technology will grow. “We have diversified products, including building products. We have energy solutions like rooftop solar panels and green roofs for urban areas where gardens can be planted on the rooftop,” she notes. Efforts in green technology will of course continue in the tire division, Bridgestone’s core business.

The company has begun construction on its first LEED (leadership in energy and environmental design) certifiable automotive service location, which will meet a long list of environmental standards. It has also received LEED certification for a plant in Tennessee, and last year it launched the nation’s first environmentally friendly oil-change service. This year Bridgestone opened an environmental education classroom and habitat at its Warren plant in Tennessee.

As for inclusion, “We have a diversity council and a women’s business council, and this year we expect to charter people of color and veterans teammate network groups,” Jones adds.

Andrea Ramage directs sustainability at CH2M Hill
As director of sustainable solutions at engineering, construction and operations firm CH2M Hill (Englewood, CO), Andrea Ramage heads a seven-person team. The team works with the company’s business units to teach staff about sustainability and support the pursuit of client business. The team also delivers some client work directly and handles speaking engagements.

“Our philosophy,” Ramage says, “is to infuse sustainability in everything we
do, from business development and proposals work to the planning, design, construction and operations of all types of civil works, from transit systems to green buildings.”

Recently her group was involved in the expansion of a wastewater treatment plant. “We worked with the design team, led the initial workshop where goals were set, and assigned a sustainability coordinator to make sure the goals are incorporated in the design process,” Ramage says.

Another project, this one for the city of San Francisco, CA, offers solar mapping to promote the installation of solar panels by city residents and businesses. “Our IT team used Google Earth technology to create a solar information website for the city,” Ramage explains. Interested parties can type in their addresses which are pinpointed on an aerial map. An algorithm calculates the solar potential of the roof at that address, the number of solar panels that could be installed, how much energy they would produce, the cost, even the nearest panel installer.

“It’s a one-stop shopping portal that can determine if solar energy is a possibility in a specific situation,” she says.

A favorite part of the job for Ramage is helping clients develop their own sustainability strategies. “A lot of corporations and cities would benefit from a planned approach to get
the most beneficial and cost-effective outcomes for the environment, society and their organizations. Although many client organizations already have sustainability initiatives
under way, few have a truly strategic approach that delivers the best outcomes.”

Ramage received her BS in civil and geological engineering from Princeton University (Princeton, NJ) in 1988 and an MS in engineering and geotechnical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Blacksburg, VA) in 1993. She is a licensed professional engineer and a LEED-accredited professional.

She joined Ch2M Hill as a geotechnical engineer in 1993, but wasn’t introduced to sustainability until 1996. “I discovered sustainability and rediscovered my passion for the environment.

“Soon after, in 2000, I launched the company’s internal corporate responsibility program. Now it has become a full-blown corporate environmental management system that conforms to the ISO14001 standard.

“I stayed in touch with the company’s range of sustainable client solutions. In 2004, I was
hired to lead this aspect of the firm’s sustainability effort. The last five years have been both rewarding and challenging!”

Growing up in a “geologically fascinating” area just outside Philadelphia, PA, Ramage was always interested in geology. The transition to the environment was natural.

“Sustainability is exploding,” she says. “As a global society, we’re going to be dealing with energy and water issues, climate change and ecosystem protection for a long time. It’s a
good basis on which to build a business and a career.”

ME Kirsten Shilkitus: solar panel development at DuPont
Kirstin H. Shilkitus is a development engineer at DuPont (Wilmington, DE), the science-based products and services company. An ME by training, Shilkitus helps develop equipment and machinery the company needs, either for R&D
or existing manufacturing lines.

Right now she’s working on an R&D project. “My role is to take the product out of the lab,” she explains. “We’ve developed a film technology for protecting thin-film photovoltaics used in solar panels, and now I’m working on the technology and equipment to make the product manufacturable.”

It’s a unique way to handle the film, she explains. “I’m designing the equipment from the ground up.”

The new product will go into generation 3 photovoltaics, which are more flexible than gen 1
but retain all their efficiency, she says. The new solar panels will weigh about a tenth of conventional ones: four instead of forty pounds. They are expected to be cheaper and use
less energy to manufacture: more environmentally friendly all around.

Recently the work received a $3 million grant from the Department of Energy as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. DuPont has committed another $6 million.

Shilkitus got her BSME from the University of Delaware in 2003, and started as a reliability engineer at DuPont’s Tyvek manufacturing plant. At school she had interned with the Army Research Lab in Aberdeen, MD, designing handheld detection equipment to test water for contamination.

“DuPont has a lot of opportunities in green engineering,” Shilkitus says. “We do fuel cell research and biofuel research. From an ME standpoint, one of my colleagues is working on
a roof structure assembly to reduce the cost of installing solar panels and make it more affordable for the average person.”

She finds her work both challenging and rewarding. “Developing new ideas is a challenge, but our group does a lot of brainstorming. There’s so much social interest in what I’m doing now, and a huge drive to get to gen 3, which will have a big positive impact on the environment. It’s very exciting.”

In her spare time Shilkitus mentors a high school FIRST Robotics team sponsored by DuPont. Most kids on these teams go on to study science or engineering, she says. “They come in without any direction but leave knowing what they want to do. It’s very uplifting!”

Diversity and opportunity at DuPont
John Larock, staffing manager at DuPont talent acquisition, admits that “There are only a few job openings right now.” But sustainability continues to be a major focus at DuPont, he declares, and by 2015 DuPont expects to have doubled its investment in R&D programs with direct environmental benefits for customers and consumers.

The company employs many MEs, ChEs and EEs. Most of them are generalists, able to work in a variety of different programs and businesses. The company has black, Hispanic, Asian, women’s and LGBT networks. “Diversity brings in new ideas,” says Larock. “We work to have an employee population that reflects the population of the U.S.”

The company works with the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering to provide
K through 12 programs on science and technology. “DuPont was one of the first companies
to provide scholarships in science; in early days we helped develop the discipline of ChE,” Larock adds.

Ebba Hansen: packaging sustainability at Georgia-Pacific
Packaging sustainability engineer Ebba Hansen helps Georgia-Pacific’s plants and the plants’ customers understand sustainability and fiber certification. She explores how to make packaging more sustainable and conducts surveys on sustainability.

“The sustainability effort in packaging is focused around reducing use of raw materials while maintaining strength and performance,” Hansen explains. “Reducing the amount of material also means less energy and water are needed, and reduces transportation costs. We’ve changed box designs to use less fiber and sometimes less corrugated material, and the fiber is certified, which means it comes from sustainable forests and sources including recycled paper.”

Hansen is part of a two-techie sustainability team at the company’s Innovation Institute, which provides technical support for the packaging division. Once package designers create a design, Hansen evaluates it for fiber use or, when the designers send several options, Hansen determines which is most sustainable.

She launched into this job last fall. “I started doing some sustainability projects with the packaging division a few years ago,” she says. “This team was created a year ago because there were so many requests for help from plants and customers.”

Hansen has a 1993 BSChE from Washington State University. After graduation she worked in product development at several companies that made disposable baby diapers and related products.

In 2004 she was hired by Georgia-Pacific as a product development engineer in the packaging division. She went on to the cellulose group, where she drew on her previous experience with diapers. Last summer she was offered the sustainability job and thought it was a great opportunity.

Hansen grew up in a mill town on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, so working in timber products seems very natural to her, and sustainability is also familiar territory. “As students
we planted trees on land owned by the timber companies. They’ve been doing sustainability
for years,” she says; “More than 75 percent of corrugated packaging is recycled.”

Her biggest challenge now is educating customers about sustainability and what it can mean to their companies. The reward is coming up with solutions to help preserve resources for future generations.

Currently on maternity leave after her fourth child, Hansen says that juggling job and family
is demanding: “It’s hectic, but I’m a very organized person.” After work she’s involved in activities like Girl Scouts and a baseball team. “My husband coaches, and I’m the team manager and do the bookwork,” she says.

Anisha Ladha is a senior environmental engineer at Intel
At Intel Corp (Santa Clara, CA), “I am global program manager for electronic waste,” Anisha Ladha explains. “I manage the program that determines what we do with old electronic equipment on a worldwide basis, including compliance obligations to our original equipment manufacturers in Europe.”

The discarded products go to recyclers who shred them and separate them into plastics, metals and glass. “Copper waste can be resold, of course. But plastics are difficult because there are so many types. In the U.S. we host or sponsor community collection events. It’s a shared responsibility,” she says.

In the past five years Intel has hosted community collection events in Ireland and Costa Rica as well as the U.S. In the U.S. alone Ladha estimates that recycling has kept 6.7 million pounds of electronic waste out of landfills. Her work involves keeping up with the interpretation of many different regulations, and facilitating collection events. Ladha leads the global effort and sets strategy for what the company will do, and also manages environmental health and safety communications.

“I draft the safety and environmental section of the corporate responsibility report in partnership with the corporate responsibility group,” she says. It gives me a creative outlet for articulating the environmental, health and safety message.”

Ladha has a 1996 BS in environmental science and BA in religion from Florida International University, and a 1998 MS in environmental change and management from Oxford University
in England. Between 1998 and 1999 she worked in Washington, DC as an intern for the Aga Khan foundation.

“I started as an intern and ended up as a program manager, trying to build awareness of issues through community walks we organized in the U.S. and Canada. Our theme was that healthy individuals lead to healthy communities and, ultimately, healthy nations. It was interactive and fun.”

In 2000 Ladha joined Intel to manage the chemical waste program at a high-volume manufacturing site. “We had several different types of waste. I was responsible for the chemicals, primarily solvents and acids.”

She started with responsibility for one building, but in a few years she was involved in basic design of the chemical waste system and managing the waste stream as well. “I helped with the design of new buildings to be sure they had the least possible impact on the environment and met Resource Conservation Recovery Act regulations,” she explains.

Ladha is proud of the role she plays in Intel’s sustainability program. She notes that Intel is
the largest renewable energy purchaser in the U.S. and has also invested in renewable energy projects in China and Germany. “We buy about 1.3 billion KwH of renewable power per year, about 30 to 40 percent of our energy use,” she says.

Ladha was born on Lake Victoria in Tanzania to parents whose family roots were in India; she grew up in Florida. In her free time she enjoys choreographing Indian folk dance, and she works at her mosque, helping students with their college applications.

Aglaia Kong is chief architect of Symantec’s storage and availability
management group
At Symantec (Mountain View, CA), Aglaia Kong is a VP and Fellow in storage and availability management. As chief architect of storage and IT she’s responsible for overseeing the engineering, product architecture and technology directions for the company’s storage management products, like Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server and Veritas Command Central Storage.

It’s Kong’s job to ensure that all elements integrate successfully and all enterprise products work well together. Her group includes a thousand engineers worldwide, but she has no actual direct reports.

It’s a major focus of Symantec to provide customers with green IT, and Kong notes that most of the company’s software lets customers leverage their businesses in a more efficient manner.

“Approximately 70 percent of the electricity used in IT is for cooling computers,” she notes. “Older computers and arrays use more power and need more cooling.

“At Symantec we have multiple tiers of software that can help. Our Altiris product line has a power-monitoring feature that detects when a server is not needed and should be shut off, or when a workload can be moved to a cooler computer,” Kong explains.

Optimizing storage can also help minimize power usage, as storage devices use a lot of power to operate and generate a lot of heat. But in many cases no more than a third of available storage is used. “Our products help identify what storage has not been optimized. We have the technology to do server and storage consolidation and migration to optimize the storage.”

Between 80 and 90 percent of data is duplicated in most server use, Kong notes, but, “We have solutions to reduce the number of copies and archive old information and ultimately reduce storage usage.”

Kong was born in mainland China, moved to Macao as a child, then to Canada where she finished high school. She came to the U.S. for a 1990 BSEE from the University of Minnesota and is working on her PhD in ChE there, with only the dissertation left to go.

After she completed her BSEE Kong worked for a small firm in Montana on FDA-related projects, then did GPS mapping and satellite work for Trimble Navigation (San Francisco, CA). She started her own software company, working on GPS systems supported by Motorola, ESRI, Trimble and Magellan.

In 1997 she joined Veritas as a software engineer. When Symantec acquired the company in 2005, Kong was retained as a principal engineer. In 2006 she was the first woman to become
a Symantec Fellow and distinguished engineer, the company’s premier technology leadership honors.

The Green IT Forum
Kong has been working in green technology for three years, and is a founder of her industry’s Green IT Forum. “I pulled together with people in charge of green IT at IBM, Intel and NetAp to create the forum,” she explains. “IBM worked on a chipset and Intel embedded green sensors into the design. We worked closely with Intel to leverage that effort.”

Her love of engineering extends into her free time as well; her major hobbies are satellite chasing and working on a way to do cold fusion. Her green efforts at Symantec, she says, are “more manageable though perhaps not as sexy as cold fusion.

“But we are saving energy. It was my passion for cold fusion that got me interested in green technology in the first place, and helping companies manage their IT and make it more efficient and green is very rewarding.”

Aligning social responsibility at Symantec
Cecily Joseph, director of corporate responsibility at Symantec, oversees the company’s global corporate social responsibility program, which includes environmental, social and governance program development, integration and alignment. It’s her job to develop policies and programs to align environmental stewardship.

She notes that the company’s green efforts include reducing its own energy use by 15 percent by 2012, reducing packaging and making it sustainable, reducing employee travel and commuting and deploying green IT, at the company’s own data center and in laptops and desktops company-wide. “The IT industry contributes 2 percent of all carbon output, even rivaling the airlines. Minimizing that energy use is one of the goals of our efforts,” she says.

Joseph explains that the company launched its environmental effort in 2006, when it signed the UN global compact. “The environment was a cornerstone of the compact, and that’s when we began to drive our own environmental program,” she says.

As a result, Symantec is working to maximize its energy efficiency. “We’ve adopted the LEED building checklist to green our buildings. Our Springfield, OR site has already reached LEED gold certification.”

“In green IT we’re in the middle of a paradigm shift,” she notes. “I’m excited about it for the value it adds to both corporate responsibility and the bottom line.”

D/C

Laurel A. McKee Ranger is a freelance business writer headquartered in Randolph, NJ.

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