Ozarks initiatives help businesses lighten environmental impact

Pursuing sustainability takes work, but Springfield fitness equipment manufacturer Stamina Products Inc. has made the transition while barely breaking a sweat.  

Stamina’s environmental efforts have been recognized with bronze level status by Ozarks GreenScore, a collaborative program launched in 2009 to help businesses and organizations improve efficiency and help the environment. The company joins green level member BKD LLP, silver level members The Discovery Center and Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce and fellow bronze member DeWitt & Associates on a growing list of local examples of environmental sustainability.

‘Socially responsible’
Stamina’s reason for joining Ozarks GreenScore is simple, according to Diane Zipf, marketing manager for the company, 2490 N. Alliance Ave.

“It’s just becoming the socially responsible thing to do. More and more businesses are moving in that direction,” she said.

The program has touched on everything from how products are manufactured and shipped, to energy-efficient lighting, materials recycling and getting the most out of recyclable resources, such as paper.

“We just use a piece of paper until it can’t be used anymore,” Zipf said. Used paper goes into what the staff calls GOOS boxes, which stands for “good on one side.”  

“We’ll use that for in-house documents that really don’t need to be clean on the other side,” Zipf said. “Once they’re just about as full of ink as they could possibly be, we recycle them.”

Zipf declined to disclose the company’s costs for its sustainability initiatives, but through its participation in GreenScore,  she said Stamina has cut resource usage and costs. In 2009, the company used 66 percent less paper, 4 percent less water and about 10 percent less electricity.

The company expects further savings in 2010 with its initiatives to recycle packaging and scrap metal from returned products, to reduce air emissions through fuel-efficient shipping via the Environmental Protection Agency’s SmartWay Transportation Partnership, and to conserve water, fertilizer and grounds keeping resources through its new lawn maintenance program.

Ozarks GreenScore is a collaboration between the Ozarks Center for Sustainable Solutions at Drury University, the Drury Students in Free Enterprise team, the Partnership for Sustainability and Choose Environmental Excellence.

Ozarks GreenScore provides technical assistance to entities that want to make their operations greener, rating those efforts with a score sheet that’s designed specifically for this region.

GreenScore organizers sat down with local experts in various areas, including CU, area electric cooperatives, Watershed Committee of the Ozarks, Ozarks Transportation Organization and Ozarks Greenways, to formulate the score sheet.

“We took some best practices that exist nationally – there are programs like this in different parts of the country – but we wanted to make sure it was unique to our area that reflected the resources that we have available here,” said Doug Neidigh, program manager for Drury’s Ozarks Center for Sustainable Solutions.

The resulting program is applicable to businesses of all types and all sizes.

The Ozarks Center for Sustainable Solutions’ role is to provide hands-on technical assistance in pollution prevention and energy conservation, including on-site assessments, student internship projects and grant administration. Launched in July 2008 with the help of a $52,000 grant from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, OCSS provides most of its service at little or no cost to the businesses and organizations it helps.

The Ozarks’ green arsenal
Ozarks GreenScore is one more tool in facilitating the greening of the Ozarks, complementing the ongoing efforts of founding organizations such as the Partnership for Sustainability, a joint effort of groups including the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce, the city of Springfield, Greene County and City Utilities.

Partnership members, including Missouri State University, OTC, Drury University, Springfield Public Schools, St. John’s Health System, CoxHealth and a wide variety of businesses and organizations, continue to make strides, according to Emily Fox, immediate past chairwoman of the partnership.

Even the simplest, common-sense changes can reap significant rewards. “The smallest thing can make a big impact,” Fox said.

For example, CoxHealth was able to reduce its energy consumption simply by turning off the fluorescent lights in the vending machines located throughout its facilities.

“All our machines are in well-lit areas anyway, so there’s no sense of having the front end of the Coke machine lit up; people can still see that it’s the Coke machine, so we just asked them to turn it off,” said Rod Schaffer, vice president of facilities management for CoxHealth. While vendors initially resisted this move, arguing it impaired marketing, they have since complied, with positive results in reduced energy consumption. Several other members of the Partnership have since followed CoxHealth’s lead.

“Any time you can turn off a set of lights it’s going to be that much more cost effective,” Schaffer noted.

In its $119 million slate of construction projects, CoxHealth is utilizing flooring, carpeting and wall coverings made from recycled materials and implementing an environmentally friendly roofing system. The frame and insulation of the roof will last for the life of the buildings. Any reroofing will only require replacement of the roofing surface itself, drastically reducing the waste that would go to the landfill, Schaffer said.

Meanwhile, recycling of everything from construction materials, flooring and carpets to kitchen waste and paper saves CoxHealth about $50,000 in waste disposal expenses, he said.

Neidigh noted that some good-business-sense decisions turn out to have sustainable implications.

“A lot of them they already have implemented for other reasons – maybe to reduce costs, and they just haven’t associated the environmental and energy benefits with it,” he said.

Since July 2008, Neidigh said the Ozarks Center for Sustainable Solutions has helped Missouri businesses find ways to cut more than 5,130 cubic yards of waste, 1 million killowatt hours of electricity, and 7.4 million gallons of water, providing cost savings opportunities for participating businesses of more than $340,000 per year.

An ongoing project for the center is administering Clean Diesel grant funding to help private and public fleet operators reduce air pollution and conserve fuel by retrofitting and/or replacing equipment. The application deadline is April 16, and grant reimbursements are available for 100 percent of the cost of public fleet projects, not to exceed the total grant of $35,215. There is also a 40 percent reimbursement under a cost-share program for public or private fleets with a total of $85,000 available.[[In-content Ad]]