Leading by Example

International pump manufacturer Grundfos ably demonstrates its strong commitment to sustainability in a water-saving project at its plant in California.

Few employees in the Fresno, CA, area can claim they work near a large body of water. This makes Facilities Manager Greg Gorby and his 350 co-workers at Grundfos’ Fresno manufacturing operation unique. The Denmark-based pump maker operates its oldest and second-largest (250,000, sq. ft.) U.S. facility in the city on a 27-acre site, one highlight of which is a 4-acre water-retention basin. The man-made pond is part of a water-efficiency program that is a natural extension of Grundfos’ core emphasis on sustainability, but an oddity in Fresno’s semi-arid San Joaquin Valley location. The city and its half-million residents—as well as the area’s many farmers who operate in the state’s agricultural heartland—are accustomed not only to routine water shortages, but drought conditions that have worsened in recent years.

Construction of Grundfos’ water pond was undertaken as a way for the company to trim its water needs in Fresno. At 8 million gallons annually, the site’s usage was among the highest of Grundfos’ 15 worldwide manufacturing operations. But production was not the cause. The three-shift operation, which makes most of the company’s extensive line of pump models (many of which are used on local farms), matched company figures for single-plant use of production water. The plant was also not the highest water user in Fresno, where local food-processing operations use much more. The reason, notes Gorby, was landscape irrigation. “This is required to sustain any kind of vegetative life here,” he says, “and we had a very large amount of turf at the facility.”

Most of the plant’s 8 million-gallon total—6 million gallons, all potable—were used to keep its turf and other landscaping green and attractive. So when company headquarters announced in 2009 that it would, among other goals, reduce its global water use to 2008 levels by 2025, Gorby and his team had to make changes.

Native grasses and other drought-tolerant species greet those entering Grundfos’ pump manufacturing facility in Fresno, CA. The plantings are watered entirely with captured, filtered rainwater.

Landscaping revisited

The first and easiest step was to reduce turf irrigation, which “killed a good portion of our lawns,” says Gorby. And while this helped trim the plant’s total annual usage (to 6.6 million gallons) by the end of 2010, it was not enough to alter the plant’s status as a global top user within Grundfos. And most of this water still went to site landscaping. Further reductions would require a more pro-active approach.

“So in 2012, we decided to go to zero potable water for landscape irrigation,” says Gorby. “The only potable water we would use would be for human consumption or production needs. We began our storm-water project, and invited a landscape architect in to master-plan our site.”

This is where the pond fits in, part of a $1.7 million project designed to conserve all rainwater that falls naturally on the site, and use this to maintain landscaping. But you might wonder why the plant would go to such trouble and expense if its critical water usage—for production and human consumption—was normal. Might it not have made more financial sense to sell or otherwise reduce the size of the landscaped area?

“Sustainability is Grundfos’ first core value,” explains Gorby, “so it’s integrated into the company structure that we will be sustainable. In this case, it wasn’t like we were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for water. Our water bill was relatively low. But in our eyes, the return on investment is not on the financial side for this particular investment. We committed to get to a 50% reduction by 2025, and this is a key regional piece of that. And we talked about taking our own medicine. If we truly say we believe in sustainability, sometimes you pursue projects that don’t have the best financial return on investment because they are good ideas. They are better for the community and better for Grundfos as a whole.”

After reviewing the site’s vegetation and existing water use, the architect and Gorby’s team devised a plan to contain all of the storm water that falls on the site, including “the roof, the parking. lot and anywhere on land, and contain that water and use it for our irrigation purposes.” In late 2012, construction began on the 1.6-million-gallon water-retention basin at the front of the Fresno property, and was completed in spring 2013.

Gorby, who has a background in landscape architecture, says dealing with storm water runoff involves also accounting for “all kinds of things it picks up.” This includes petroleum-based runoff, metals and other items from parking-lot surfaces that were not wanted in the irrigation water. “So we also designed a separate bioswale [near the main basin] which is where the water enters. The bioswale holds 400,000 gallons, and cleans the water through a root mass and vegetation made up of specific plant species that grow in riparian areas,” says Gorby. “This gives us a much better quality of water that we then push into our irrigation system.”

Following a trend in other parts of California, the plant also replaced much of its conventional landscape species with native, drought-tolerant plantings. “The architect’s concept was ‘agri-chic,’” says Gorby, “which was his gesture to the agriculture in the area by using masses of plantings in ribbon shapes running through the landscape. It’s an attractive alternative to the water-thirsty lawn you would have seen in the past at a Grundfos facility.”

A 4-acre water-retention basin and accompanying bioswale (foreground), completed in spring 2013, provide all landscape-irrigation needs for Grundfos’ 27-acre manufacturing site.

Sustainability trumps challenges

The project did not come without its challenges. One was the need to educate the local government on the project’s value. “This was very much outside the box for this municipality,” says Gorby, who notes that Fresno is often less empathetic toward environmental and water-conservation issues than other parts of the state. “This is because Fresno is an agricultural area, and people look at water conservation as a threat to their livelihood. Not everyone is anti-conservation,” he says, “but there’s more empathy toward the farmer. And while bioswales are not uncommon, they’re rare in industrial facilities.”

Having never been approached with such a project, the municipality didn’t know how to classify it, which delayed the start. “Because we needed to determine exactly how the water would be used, and what was acceptable to the municipality, we had only a two-month instead of a six-month construction timeline,” says Gorby. “It was a crazy couple of months.” They also needed a plan to deal with pond overflow and the potential for contamination, as well as address new mechanical considerations. “Our pump technology we used on this was the first time we had used this type of application for some of our groundwater pumps, so there were new things we had to work through, especially regarding the filtration process and communication from one pump station to another.”

A key aspect of the water-retention project, and one that appealed to the local government, was its potential for recharging groundwater. While the larger Grundfos basin is lined, the smaller bioswale is not. “And because our soil is very porous,” says Gorby, “it is able to recharge the local aquifer. We recharged about 3 million gallons last year, and will probably do more this year after we’ve had a full year to do it.” In turn, the city helped the plant fill the pond after construction using water from an underground canal that delivers untreated water runoff from the nearby mountain range to agricultural end-users. Gorby sees this as a back-and-forth process where the city will provide water for the pond in times of drought and benefit from what the pond recharges after rains.

The pumping station and filtration equipment for the plant’s irrigation system.

“The great thing about [this project],” he says, “is that there is a kind of metamorphosis where we continue to ask what we need to do to get to the next level. Our water quality, for example, is still not as high as we would like it to be because the filters clog at times. To address this, we’re looking into creating floating plant islands that feed off the algae in the pond and thereby reduce the pond’s algae levels, giving us a healthier pond. We also want to use one of our pumps with a solar application to recirculate water around the pond to give us a cleaner water level.” Gorby adds that after more than a full year of activity, the new landscape plants are growing in nicely. “And because we used native plants,” he notes, “after five years, many of them won’t need to be irrigated at all, so we’ll potentially be able to use the pond for other processes in the facility.”

In a short period, the site has reduced its use of potable water for irrigations uses to zero, which Grundfos sees as a positive return on investment. “There’s a good message here,” says Gorby. “Besides what it has saved the company, we’re using this for outreach and education.” He references the local technical high school whose students visit the plant regularly to test the pond water as part of an ongoing science project. “Our goal is to help educate the community and be a leader in the community,” he says, “not to do it just because it makes a lot of financial sense. We don’t do this for every [sustainable] project, but when we can, we like to, and show what can be done if you really want to push the envelope.”

Part of Fresno’s 250,000-sq.-ft. production area, which makes most of Grundfos’ extensive pump line for the North American market. It is the company’s oldest and second-largest U.S. manufacturing facility.

Other sustainable initiatives

Grundfos’ Fresno operation has completed many other sustainable projects. The most impactful may be its solar project, which includes two ground-level solar fields with more than 5000 articulating panels that cover approximately 7.5 acres. “They generate 1.1 megawatts of electricity, which is about 30% of our total energy consumption,” says Gorby. “Even more important than the energy generation is the carbon reduction that we have made a focus at our facility. With the solar panels, we get 2.4 million pounds annually of carbon reduction, so this will save about 50 million pounds of carbon over the 20-year life of the contract we have with our solar provider.”

A background in landscape architecture helped Fresno Facilities Manager Greg Gorby ensure the plant’s water-conservation project met company goals to reduce site consumption of potable water.

Other projects include LED interior-lighting retrofits with motion-sensing applications that dim lights in areas of no activity, and photo-sensitive applications that dim lights when natural light is available. According to Gorby, the plant also retrofitted the entire exterior of our facility with LED lights, including all parking-lot lights “and even the flagpole lights.”

The urinals and toilets at the 41-year-old facility have been upgraded to low-flow versions, and variable frequency drives installed throughout. Also, a water-saving filtration system on the plant’s pump test tanks was put in place. “We now use charcoal filtration with those,” says Gorby, “so instead of having to dump thousands of gallons of water every day or week, we’re able to keep that water in there for long periods of time because the filtration keeps it clean.”

Adding that the facility is “always trying to push the envelope,” Gorby mentions an upcoming HVAC project that he expects to have enormous energy-saving potential. “We’re looking at going to an indirect evaporative cooling system for our production area on a very large scale,” he says. “It’s a technology that’s widely used in Australia, but not here. You need a warm-air climate for it to be effective, which we obviously have.”

Indirect evaporative cooling systems lower air temperature through the process of vaporization that occurs as liquid water evaporates. It can cost significantly less than traditional air conditioning systems that depend on liquid refrigerants to remove heat. “Its potential cost-savings are 80% over a standard HVAC system,” says Gorby, who adds that the system would also qualify for large rebates from the local natural-gas utility. “This is really our last major energy-saving opportunity here,” he says. “We have clean energy, we have solar and a lot of other projects, but this particular one will have a dramatic impact on our energy use, since about 40% of our electricity use goes to HVAC. If we have a reduction, it will be one of the biggest we are capable of performing at this point. But,” he adds, “if we can find another level of efficiency and have it pay back in under five years, we’ll still do it.”

Sustainability Leads Grundfos’ Core Values

Anyone from Grundfos will tell you that the 71-year-old company—founded and still headquartered in the small town of Bjerringbro, Denmark—did not become one of the world’s leading pump makers simply because of its reliable products. Among the approximately 19,000 worldwide Grundfos employees, it’s a fundamental expectation that the company’s 105 pump models and related offerings will be nothing less than dependable and efficient before they leave the plant. You’re likely to hear, however, about the company’s six core values: Sustainable; Open and Trustworthy; Focused on People; Independent (a reference to the company’s unique Foundation-based business structure); Partnership; and Relentlessly Ambitious. You’ll learn that these have created and continue to support a world-class organization that focuses not only on the manufacture of quality pumps, but on the role pumps can play in making the world a better place. It’s not by accident that “Sustainability” leads these values.

“We think we can make a true difference, not only in providing clean water to the world, but also at the same time, we can also improve the quality of life for people,” said Jørgen Bjelskou, Director, Global Public Affairs, to a gathering of U.S. and other trade-press members at company headquarters in October. “Sustainability is at the very heart of our purpose. We believe that the rule to follow regarding sustainability is not to talk about it but to show by excellence that we can make a true difference.”

Noting that pumps account for some 10% of the world’s electrical usage, Bjelskou said that percentage could be “cut to 4% if we can open eyes and swap out old pumps in the world to the most efficient pumps. This cannot happen overnight, but we intend to accelerate this development.”

To do this, Grundfos conducts its sustainable efforts on several fronts: in the efficiency of its products that are proven to reduce energy; in ensuring that their own operations are as sustainable and socially responsible as possible; and in the company’s work with governments around the world to promote the need for water conservation and assist their efforts to do so.

“We do not take political positions,” Bjelskou noted, “but our role is to provide knowledge. That’s what we have been doing in the European Union the last 10 to 15 years. With regard to circulating pumps, for example, E.U. policymakers have gradually strengthened the requirements, so that now they must be very energy efficient to be allowed in the marketplace.” The E.U. goal is to reduce levels of CO2 emitted through the operation of circulating pumps (common in European home-heating applications) from the 2006 high of 23 million tons annually to 15 million tons annually. In typical Grundfos fashion, the company also enacted a goal to reduce its own worldwide CO2-emission levels and hold them at 2008 levels.

Under the guidance of new President Mads Nipper (see “News,” Efficient Plant, November 2014), Grundfos is working to increase its presence in the U.S., especially in the areas of commercial building and water treatment. As the project at its Fresno plant demonstrates, the company is well positioned to aid U.S. efforts to conserve water and energy. “Pumps are a very local business,” Nipper told the trade-press group, “which is why it’s important to work state by state and customer by customer. We want to make a major difference in the energy consumption and water supply in the world. These are the two most important things we do,” he added. “We are not just somebody who sells pumps and tries to make money from that.”