How Recycling System Reduced Water Use by 25 Million Gallons at the University of Alabama-Birmingham

Listen to or read the questions and answers from Matt Winslet, of the University of Alabama-Birmingham as he talks about their water recycling system that saved the university 25 million gallons a year. Green cleaning in action! Read the excerpt below from Facilitiesnet.com

Water Ripples, photo by Macky Franklin, via flickr.com

1. Briefly describe how the water recycling system works, and how the school uses the water that's collected.

UAB has three centralized chilled water plants with machines capable of 38,000 tons of cooling. Serving 47 campus and hospital buildings we use a lot of water in our cooling towers during the evaporative and blow-down process.

As condensate water is gravity-drained from air handler chilled water coils, it is intercepted and collected in small basins positioned locally at each air handler. Each local basin has a small level-controlled sump-pump sized to transfer collected water to a larger 500-gallon collection tank. The 500-gallon collection tank contains level controls that pump high-pressure, filtered condensate into the chilled-water return-line before it leaves the building. This rise in pressure is sensed blocks away at the central plant and water is relieved from the chilled water return line into the cooling tower. This in turn reduces makeup water required during the evaporative cooling process. Note that if either the small basin sump pump, high pressure return pump, or central plant tower relief valve fails, the water exits down the drain in the building as it has for many years. The system works very well with ground water sources too.

Read the full article on Facilitiesnet.com

SkyPro at ISSA 2013 in Las Vegas

Are you stopping by ISSA/Interclean North America in Las Vegas? Come check our booth! We're at 3901. For more photos and info about ISSA, check out our Facebook page.

Managers Discuss Sustainability Efforts

Sustainability Building by Hietsun Photography via flickr.com

Facility Maintenance Decisions hosted a round-table with building and grounds managers across the country on the topic of sustainability. SkyPro prioritizes being clean n' green with our window cleaning systems, so we wanted to hear what decisions real managers make to tackle these issues. Read more on Facilities.net, and check out the excerpt below. 

Devaney: [...] I once asked a group during a staff development training session, “What does sustainability mean to you?” So many related it to recycling. I was a bit surprised at that. So for the next hour we discussed sustainable initiatives. Recycling is much more than paper. We recycle lamps, batteries, engine oil, carpet, construction building materials, furniture, equipment, vehicles, to name a few. There is a sustainability policy associated with every department, from construction and design, procurement services, facilities, landscape and grounds, on through the academic programs. Planet, people and prosperity; relate one of the three, or all, in every business decision made, and you have a successful sustainable program.

Read the whole discussion on Facilities.net.

The four “I” words behind safety culture excellence

 This is an excerpt from an ISHN article.

ISHN Guest Blog: There is no “I” in the word “team,” but according to one of our customers there is an “I” in safety – four of them, in fact. Four “I” words sum up what this customer believes it took to get his organization to begin the safety culture improvement journey.

Illuminate: There is often a lack of understanding of what safety culture really is and how an effective improvement process takes place. There is general knowledge about regulations, the foundational basics of reacting to conditions in an effort to protect employees from the hazards that exist in the workplace. There is usually also some fairly general knowledge of visually recognizing unsafe acts and the need to address those who aren’t doing a job as safely as it could be done. Recognizing unsafe acts and conditions is not enough to achieve non-injury excellence for the people at the workface.

To read the full article, visit ISHN.com.