50 Shades of Green
Editor’s Note: Neil is the Vice President of Work Place Services and Country General Manager for the United Kingdom at Agilent. This is his story of how Agilent is going green and increasing our sustainability.
Agilent has a corporate colour palette. I wish it was like one of those make-up boxes, complete with a mirror in the lid and a brush tucked into the side, ready to be shipped at a moment’s notice to a building project somewhere in the world. In reality, it’s a website from Corporate Branding with Pantone codes.
Choosing colours from the palette are best left as local decisions. My observation is that in much of Asia they prefer reds and oranges, as this picture of a recent pantry upgrade in Penang shows. Korea though, chose a high-tech brushed aluminum and LED affair for their consolidation of three offices into one; while the team in Boston went with lime green on a recent repurpose of an ex-manufacturing facility into an R&D and customer training campus. How wrong we might have been if the colours had been imposed from afar.
My favorite colour? Green, of the environmental variety. Agilent has been focused on sustainability projects for a long time and we regularly receive recognition including a listing in Newsweek’s top green companies ranking, and being graded a B in the annual Carbon Disclosure Project. Go Agilent!
There are many aspects to our focus on sustainability. One shade of green is using renewable energy from our solar power systems in Santa Clara, Waldbronn, Manesar and, most recently, in Church Stretton. Another shade of green is energy conservation. In FY17 Agilent invested over $4m in LED lighting upgrades and new chillers resulting in a 2682 metric ton carbon reduction — that’s equivalent to taking 571 cars off the road to you and me — and it also yields $1m savings a year. Yet another shade of green is water conservation — our Manesar site in India has a giant tank under the building to harvest all the rain water that falls in the roof. Recycling adds another dimension and Agilent’s goal is to divert 90% of its waste from landfill.
New construction is an obvious target, with the opportunity for the latest energy efficiency to be built in. As part of the recent construction in Waldbronn we share an energy center with the adjacent community in a symbiotic relationship where the excess heat from our cooling in the summer warms the local swimming pool. How cool/hot is that!
Our products provide other shades of green — the new Intuvo GC has a 70% smaller footprint which means it consumes less energy, less packaging, and less CO2 to transport. It was named a finalist in the 2017 Sustainability Awards for its efficiency and oil free pump. Agilent’s Remarketing Solutions Division is dedicated to recovering old instruments for resale and we offer a variety of trade in programs designed to help customers recycle and reuse. Plus of course the major contribution our products make to the environment through our end markets — Agilent instruments can perform more than 800 different tests related to the environment, food safety and the like.
Not that everything makes the cut. Part of this year was spent looking into a wind farm in Texas but ultimately it was decided it added too much complexity and risk to the company. Projects have to align with our business strategies and gross margin goals — after all we want a sustainability strategy which is sustainable!
There’s always more to do and FY18 will be a busy year. Hybrid vehicles are already in the car fleet for the first time, starting with the US, and the Bloom energy server which is an alternative energy source equivalent to taking 252 cars off the road and it avoids 344 million gallons of water being withdrawn by conventional power stations. Now that Santa Clara (the company’s biggest energy consumer) is signed up, WPS will evaluate Bloom energy servers for other sites.
All of this is good news. It’s good for the environment, it’s good for making Agilent a great place to work, it’s good for our finances, and it’s good for business as customers and investors increasingly focus on our environmental credentials.
The identification of new projects will continue and we all can contribute in our own ways, from recycling waste, to conserving energy and water, to proposing new ideas to local management. We may not be supplying employees with a paint brush and the corporate colour palette anytime soon, but everyone can play a role in helping to paint the company green.
