For Ontario manufacturers today, finding ways to reduce costs and improve margins call for ever-more creative solutions. Paul Rak, President of VeriForm Inc., in Cambridge Ontario, found significant savings in a most unlikely strategy: Going Green.

We sometimes think of green alternatives as more expensive. VeriForm turns that notion on its head. Between 2006 and early 2009, VeriForm implemented 42 energy conservation projects. It required an investment of just over $46,000, however, the total energy savings per year has been just over $89,000 – nearly doubling the initial investment. How’d they do that?

By installing centralized programmable thermostats, adding triggers on bay doors and other insulating initiatives, VeriForm reduced natural gas costs by 90%. What’s even more remarkable is that by adding power capacitors, T5 lighting and other staff ideas electricity costs fell by 58%, even though during this same time period, the plant doubled in physical size and sales increased 45%.

“Going green is unusually easy and extremely profitable. It really is good business. The average ROI on our energy conservation projects has been just 6.2 months. Over the next 10 years these energy savings will yield for VeriForm approximately $1.42 million in additional profit.”, says Paul Rak.

Find out more about these and other programs and learning lessons by visiting veriform.ca

Tags: green, Ontario economy

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Issue This. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.