Our Second day in San Antonio began at the converted Pearl Beer Industrial Park. This is a refurbished factory/bottling plant has been changed into a “River Walk” for the citizens of S.A. It is an area of fewer tourists, oriented towards local people, with no hotels nearby with businesses and offices that serve local needs.
The development has an extensive solar installation, with the ability to generate 200 kilowatts of power. It has a public interaction station that shows the live workings of the generation process and how it all works. Visitors can see how much solar power is currently being generated, as well as the equivalent of how many homes could benefit from using solar. The kiosk also illustrates how much Co2 and Sox can be saved in power generation when compared to old coal burning power plants. Installations like this one make the solar experience more accessible and less foreign to non-science and non-sustainability oriented folks.
The “River Walk” portion of the conversion was very pretty and was built with a lessened environmental impact in mind. Landscape features are watered by the on-site water which does not need additional treatment. It also contains extensive native plant areas that attract local and native birds and animals. One of the ways they attract local people is a naturally sloped amphitheater with Texas limestone seating with native grasses covering the ground. They have shows with local musicians and performers on as many occasions as they can.
The second stop of the day was at the Sustainable Perspectives Group. This was a small firm that specializes in mostly LEED Certification assistance. Their customers are mostly commercial sites, schools and government buildings. In addition to consulting, they offer training and continuing education for groups and individuals. They are hired by both builders and architects to ensure their buildings qualify for LEED certification. They are one of the only firms in S.A. offering LEED certification, although they told us that many of the larger architectural firms have a LEED Certification person that works for them in-house. In addition they also design waste management systems as well as install and monitor air quality equipment.
Most of their time is spent problem solving rather than in documentation of their business practices. Each build-site is taken as an individual project with involvement from architects, construction engineers, mechanical engineers, and even landscape architects from time to time. This is a good way to gather resources for their clients in one place.
They also seemed to spend a lot of their time checking and double checking invoices and work plans. This is a quality assurance aspect of the firm. They are the ones that are physically there to make sure that correct materials are used when they are called for. Making sure that design specifications are carried out by the contractors that are on site, and verify that those features are in the correct place and functioning properly. In this task they act as watchdogs against corner cutting which is the norm in today’s construction practices. This diligence lets their customers feel assured that the designs and materials that were purchased at a premium are used to their maximum potential and that the savings and innovations that are incorporated into their buildings work the way that they were planned.
The final stop of the day was the San Antonio Toyota Tundra Plant. This truck factory (the sixth in the USA) was built in 2003, with the first Toyota Tundra rolling off the line in 2006. This plant was designed to be different from the ground up. It was planned to be one of the greenest auto-plants in the country, if not the world. It has been constructed to be a zero landfill contributor. All of the waste from the plant is used here and elsewhere as base materials and usable resources for other manufacturing processes.
I thought that also followed a good philosophy in building this factory in Texas. “We build trucks where people buy them, and Texans buy a lot of trucks” explains it very well in a single sentence. This idea of having products close to their end-use site carries over into the entire plant. They have many of their vendors installed as warehouse and end route destinations. This means that like the trucks that are both made and sold locally, these vendors are located right on the plant grounds. This gives them an opportunity to capitalize on; that since these vendors distribution centers are on the same land as Toyota they can save money on fuel costs because there products end use is so physically close to its shipping address.
They also have quite a few amenities that are on site as well. They have opened and continue to run the Toyota Family Medical Center. This allows them the ability to have medical treatment for their employees on-site which would reduce down time and absences from the factory floor. It is also smart to have a quality medical facility so close to such a large industrial site. This way if there were to be an accident (large or small) they would be able respond extremely fast to any sort of medical issue.
As I mentioned earlier, this plant is a zero landfill waste plant. They have also taken as many steps as possible for this factory to produce as green of a product as they are able. They have changed the paint used in the Tundra to one that is VOC free and water based. This reduces the amount of air pollution that needs to be treated on site as well as the amount of chemicals that are released into the air. They have also changed many of the plastic parts in the vehicle to low VOC plastics and in some cases even going as far as to replace the part entirely with soy based plastics. While these changes might seem small and insignificant at first glance, I believe it is a positive first step to creating a greener manufacturing climate and that these practices combined with Toyotas commitment to zero landfill contribution will someday become the normal and not the exception.
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