Making Your Shop Eco-Friendly

A recent of MMS Extra issue asked how shops feel about environmentally conscious machining and carbon-footprint reduction.

Dan Goldsmith at Elmira Stamping & Mfg. in Elmira, New York, (www.elmirastamping.com) responded by mentioning some of the practical steps that have been taken at his shop to reduce its environmental impact. He starts out by saying that this concern is long overdue and, as he says, doing something about it is “just good business.”

Here are Dan’s comments and some tips based on things they’ve done:

1. On electrically controlled machines with advanced drives, change the parameters in the spindle drives so that they ramp up a little more gradually, saving energy and money.
2. Use energy-efficient T-8 fluorescent lamps with electronic ballasts to light your shop instead of the old-fashioned T-12 lamps (the bigger ones) that waste energy and money. “Every [lost] kilowatt hour translates directly into dollars of lost profit.”
3. Recycle waste coolant and oil with companies that specialize in field. “I just spoke to a rep a couple of weeks ago about filtering our press oil into burnable fuel oil for our boilers to heat our plant.” Dan also suggests considering bio-degradable coolants.
4. “Also what about all that scrap metal? Is it being properly recycled? This is a good area to consider renegotiating for best price.”
5. Recycle used carbide.
6. Run more work during second or third shifts on off-peak energy hours.