by Anna Ste.Marie
While the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin is most commonly known for baseball, breweries, and its gorgeous location on Lake Michigan, it has recently been earning a new sort of fame: sustainable manufacturing practices.
Eager to be educated about what takes to attain sustainability for a manufacturer, a bus load of students from the World Affairs Seminar went into downtown Milwaukee to tour such places.The first stop that the bus took was at a dilapidated A.O. Smith factory that has not been in service since the 90s. The yard was filled with waste gravel and garbage. The 1.5 million square feet of buildings were collapsing and rusted. Benji, a representative for the company, stated, “Over the next two years, we are going to demolish all these buildings, and we are going to clean up the environmental contamination, and essentially put in new roads for a new business park.”
The second stop was at Helios, a solar panel manufacturer. This facility has only been open for about six months. It is incredibly efficient and clean. One way they conserved energy was by not air conditioning the building. Secondly, there were skylights that acted as the primary light source. The overhead lights would only turn on if the light detectors sensed that the room was not bright enough, and would turn off as soon as adequate sunlight returned. The next step that Helios is taking to achieve a higher level of sustainability is having a night shift come in. If they can have workers constructing solar panels 24 hours a day, the machines neither have to turn on nor power down, which consumes the most energy.
The final stop that the students on the sustainable manufacturing field trip was Menomonee Valley Industrial Center. This center houses companies such as Palermo Villa Inc., a frozen pizza company and Charter Wire, a major wire producer.
“We are getting rid of the legacy of contaminated properties,” Dave Misky, Assistant Executive Director of Redevoplment Authority of the City of Milwaukee explains. This industrial center had developed a storm water system that is nationally recognized for its sustainability.
Renovating contaminated facilities was the main message delivered to the WAS students on this field trip. In the future, they will know how to install alternative energy saving into their workplaces, weather it be a family owned business, or a multinational corporation like the ones they visited.