What’s Your True Green?

LEED’s EBOM (Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance) program has provided additional incentive and challenge, in that it requires more granular data than most facilities have, and thus requires capital investments in submetering—of specific building areas, rooms, and equipment. BD has begun a pilot program at one of its U.S. locations to develop procedures and policies around the EBOM requirements, taking advantage of state and federal grants. The idea is to build a foundation to roll out EBOM worldwide, Malinowski says. For instance, EBOM requires a “green cleaning” protocol, and once that’s developed locally it can be adopted globally.

BD is also drawing inspiration and best practices from EPA’s Energy Star program. It so happens that Malinowski serves as the lead industry representative on ISPE’s Sustainable Facilities Community of Practice, and ISPE itself announced a partnership with Energy Star in March. “This is a way to leverage both what the EPA and [ISPE] member companies are doing,” he says.

Energy Star’s pharma-specific Energy Performance Indicator (EPI) provides another set of metrics by which facilities can gauge their greenness and benchmark with other sites. It is an Excel-based program that relies on specific data about plant size, hours of operation, annualized energy purchases, heating and cooling degree days, and so on.

Submetering
The Energy Star Challenge, whose general mission is to improve the energy efficiency of commercial and industrial buildings by 10 percent or more—relies upon a toolkit that requires comprehensive data from manufacturers. The importance of submetering also arises in this context, said Walt Tunnessen, Energy Star national program manager, speaking at March’s Interphex show in New York. Sites seeking Energy Star designation must have more than half of their building square footage in manufacturing. If not, they must provide additional data particular to their manufacturing spaces, usually requiring additional metering and investment.

The industry does not have as much submetering in place as it should, Tunnessen said. One problem: The data that the meters provides is often not well integrated with building automation systems (BAS).

Submetering is challenging for Merck, said Chris Broome, senior engineer for Merck’s global energy team, speaking at the same event, and would like to have more in place. A significant portion of the company’s energy programs are “low cost or no cost,” and so it’s a tougher sell for programs that require significant investments. Nonetheless, Broome said, Merck has designated “energy funds” that go towards efficiency-related projects. The eventual goal for Merck, said Broome: detailed, real-time visibility about energy usage at each site.

Whether for LEED or Energy Star, most of the requisite data is readily available, Malinowski notes, and the issue is managing it. Like many, BD works with an outside energy monitoring firm to cull through utility bills and other information from sites around the world, to populate a database, and then present the information within a single dashboard. Merck outsources this function, too, Broome noted.

For most drug manufacturers, implementing a basic energy metrics program can pay huge dividends, said Tunnessen. “They’re not sexy,” he said, “but they are low-risk.”

In the Lab
Another relatively new initiative is the Labs21 project (www.labs21century.gov/), an EPA/Department of Energy joint project aimed at making all laboratories more environmentally sound. The program’s LEEP, or Laborotory Energy Efficiency Profiler, tool, helps labs to look at areas that may be easy targets for immediate improvements—ventilation, heating and cooling, and so on. Used with the Labs21 Energy Benchmarking Tool, a web-based database containing energy use information from more than 200 labs, labs can benchmark how they’re doing in terms of whole-building metrics (e.g., BTU/sf-yr) as well as system-level metrics (e.g., ventilation W/cfm).

Merck plans to take advantage of Labs21, noted Broome. Many aspects of lab work can be made more energy-efficient, he said, and projects are easier to accomplish within labs than in GMP environments.

Identify and Integrate
How does a manufacturer identify what metrics are needed throughout the organization, and prioritize them? This is where NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is lending support with its new sustainability measurement infrastructure repository (SMIR). The tool includes three components, says Shaw Feng of NIST’s manufacturing systems integration division: an indicator repository that stores information on what to measure, a set of measurement guidelines, and a specification of reporting measurement results.

“To become sustainable, a company needs to develop and implement a company-wide sustainability measurement infrastructure,” Feng says. But selecting the right indicators requires cross-disciplinary expertise, budget awareness, market understanding, and so on. Ideally, companies would have as many sustainability metrics as possible, Feng says. But practically, even experts can be overwhelmed by the scope of the task.
 
Sound methods for selecting companywide indicators already exist, Feng notes. Examples include the pressure-state-response method developed by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the driving force-pressure-state-impact-response developed by the EU, and the stressor-status-effect-integrality-well being (SSEIW) method for metric classification developed by Oklahoma State University’s Karen High. “The proposed hierarchy can be applied within the framework of life-cycle assessment (LCA), which provides a promising solution to "best-practice" metric identification as well as expanding the LCA applications to the sustainability field,” writes High [3].

“A company can select suitable indicators by going through the process of problem analysis, risk characterization, pressure point identification, and goal setting,” Feng says. Once that’s been done, the manufacturer can measure processes and apply valid benchmarks by which to improve.

References
1.    Sustainability: The “Embracers” Seize Advantage. MIT Sloan Management Review. 2011. http://sloanreview.mit.edu./files/saleable-pdfs/52314.pdf
2.    Van Der Vorst, G., Dewulf, J., et al. A Systematic Evaluation of Resource Consumption of API Production at Three Different Levels. Environ. Sci. Technol. 45 (2011), 3040-3046.
3.    High, K. A new conceptual hierarchy for identifying environmental sustainability metrics. Environmental Prog. 23.4 (2004), 291-301.