McWane, Scrubbing the smokestack

Manufacturing in Action, Source : The Manufacturer US

In the 84 years since McWane’s first foundry opened in Birmingham, AL, the company has grown into a major though very focused player. John O’Hanlon reports on the company’s journey to becoming a leader in the quest for safe and pollution-free foundry practices

McWane melts over 750,000 tons of scrap steel each year, including 800,000 automobiles. This it turns into ductile iron pipe for the water supply industry, soil pipe used in high-rise buildings, and a range of water flow control valves and fire hydrants. A fourth, smaller division fabricates steel propane tanks and fire extinguishers. Today McWane employs more than 7,000 people at 25 locations, including one in Australia and a greenfield development in China, which started production in October 2005.

After a relatively stable phase from its inception in 1921 through the 1970s, the company grew rapidly through a series of strategic acquisitions starting in the mid-1980s through the end of the millennium to its current size. Environmental, health and safety programs in place at the acquired companies were modified as needed to meet McWane standards and to serve the specific needs of those operations.

Starting around the turn of the new millennium the company decided that it wanted to be an industry leader by putting in place a best-in-class environmental, health and safety program that would stand as a benchmark for the industry. The first step in this process was to establish a consistent approach to managing EHS issues across the company.

At the time, Jeet Radia was acting as a consultant to the company on environmental matters. About three years ago he came into the company as assistant vice president for environmental programs. About the same time, Barbara Wisniewski joined the company as assistant vice president for health and safety programs. Together, they had the responsibility of overseeing the implementation of the company’s comprehensive environmental, health and safety management system based on ISO 14000, the proposed ISO 18000 standard, and OSHA’s Draft Health and Safety Management Guidelines.

The decentralized structure of McWane, which had worked very well over the years from the point of view of customer service, competitiveness, and profitability, was not as effective when it came to EHS management, so the new system was designed to provide a standard framework that could be applied in all facilities. “We still operate in a fairly decentralized fashion from the production, sales and marketing, and finance point of view, but on EHS we’re much more coordinated now,” says Radia.

This umbrella program is based on ISO 14000 and delivered in part by ISO 14000 consultants, but it’s not an immediate goal to get all the plants certified. “Our internal EHS management system is based on all the major components of ISO 14000, which is setting objectives, having document control, having written procedures, and following the plan-do-check-act cycle,” he says.

A major achievement has been to get highly qualified staff in place. Group environmental compliance directors and group health and safety compliance directors have been appointed at each of McWane’s four manufacturing groups, and people have been put in place at every facility whose only job is to coordinate and monitor the company’s EHS program. In all, about 150 new appointments have been made over the last six years.

Of course, many manufacturing companies have embraced ISO 14000. McWane has gone much further, according to Radia. “We realized as we put these programs in place that we’d be collecting a lot of environmental data within the facilities, and if we wanted to coordinate all that we’d have to have a large electronic database. We set out to find the best such product and chose opsEnvironmental from ESP. This is a Web-based system that streamlines internal and regulatory compliance and helps monitor environmental performance. It gives our facilities the tools they need to collect, store, and manage the data and produce internal and government reports.”

Since 2001 McWane has been self-critically evaluating its operations with the assistance of retained, third-party auditors. So that none of the issues identified during these audits can be overlooked, the company invested in a powerful Web-based tool called Dakota Tracer. It’s one thing to know what needs to be done, Radia observes, but to manage the process of actually implementing all required actions stemming from audit findings, he needs real-time corrective action tracking. Dakota Tracer tells him at a glance who’s responsible, what’s been accomplished, and what remains undone. Once an issue has been identified and the rectifying action allocated to a staff member, the system will automatically remind that person by email a specified period of time before it’s due to be closed out. If for some reason that doesn’t happen on the due date, a further reminder is sent, and at some predetermined point in time, management is alerted if the action has still not been signed off. “The Dakota Tracer system has been very well received by our staff, and we’ve had a near-100 percent closure rate on environmental audit corrective actions,” says Radia.

Web-enabled systems like these take a lot of legwork out of EHS data management. For instance, the Safetec system now keeps track of the material safety data sheets that are required by OSHA for every chemical or other material on a site. Some 10,000 of these are current at any one time across the McWane organization, and they used to be kept in ring-binders; now they are scanned and stored electronically, allowing the company to demonstrate compliance with OSHA as well as to give employees much easier access to the information.

Radia is satisfied that the company is in control of its EHS management with the aid of all this technology, but technology alone won’t do it, he points out. In 2002 McWane employees were given a total of 125,000 hours of EHS-related training. By 2004 this had risen to 237,000 hours, with each employee getting an average of 37 hours a year—well above the industry norm. The company is also in the process of developing a long-term EHS training program for junior and middle management: “These up-and-coming managers are the future of the company. They have to be given the tools to change the way people view safety and the environment.”

At the end of the day, though, industry is judged by its performance, not its culture. That’s why McWane is investing heavily in the latest clean-air technology. A good example is at the Atlantic States Cast Iron Pipe Company (ASCIPCo) facility in Phillipsburg, NJ, a 19th-century plant acquired by McWane in 1975. Last December the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection finalized rigorous standards for mercury air emissions.

There’s still a fair amount of mercury in auto scrap, so, determined to lead the way, McWane invested $10 million in a state-of-the-art baghouse system with activated carbon injection by the German company Kuttner that will make Atlantic States cupola melting furnace the cleanest in America. “It’s just coming on stream. It’s already causing dismay among others in our industry, who claimed it would be impossible to virtually eliminate mercury emissions in a plant like this.”

Radia sees his job as providing lateral thinking on EHS, with the support of all his colleagues. “Change management is what we’re trying to do here,” he says. “Not just in systems and equipment but in culture too. Creating an environmentally aware culture takes a long time, but our company has made the commitment to being best in class, and that has made us the trailblazers in our industry.”

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