Accra-Fab Wastewater Reduction
Accra-Fab Saves Hassle and Money by Reducing Waste
Company Profile
Accra-Fab, Inc., of Liberty Lake, WA provides high quality precision custom metal fabrication and assembly for companies throughout the world. They also provide design services that can improve product design while saving money for customers.
Situation
In 2009, Accra-Fab management determined they were spending too much staff time and money handling wastewater from the metal treatment lines in their 155,000 square foot facility. They identified wastewater reduction as a priority and asked Impact Washington for assistance.
Accra-Fab brought in Impact Washington, who had helped them implement Lean in 2008. Impact Washington partnered once again with Washington State Department of Ecology as they had on past Lean and Green projects. They began with a kaizen event and spent two days evaluating the conversion coating process and looking for ways to reduce wastewater generation. They looked at a number of specific factors including:
- Lack of adequate standard work
- Solids and biological oxygen demand (BOD) content, and pH of rinse system baths over time
- Poor measurement of rinse bath conditions with their existing meter
- Different operators’ techniques in part handling and bath dragout
"The Swamp" was an uncovered waste collection pan downstream of the original "combined" system. Water was supplied by gravity feed from the storage tank (above the unit).
This pinpointed the main problem – relying on a single treatment system for numerous wastes. The Ecology team assisted them to redesign and install a new ion exchange system, improve process layout and environmental housekeeping and update standard work.
Results
The efforts of Impact Washington and Department of Ecology yielded impressive results. Accra-Fab improved system safety, reliability and standardized work practices. The largest benefits were environmental and financial. Accra-Fab reduced acidic wastewater generation from 1,500 gallons per week (or around 73,000 gallons per year) to only about 82 gallons weekly. They reduced chemical use by about 50%. And they are saving over $187,000 annually in avoided wastewater management and treatment costs.
Previously, they trucked the wastewater in barrels to an offsite treatment facility. This added time and costs to managing this stream, took up considerable floor space for drum storage, consumed fuel and produced greenhouse gases. These process improvements also allow for significant increases in capacity in the future with little additional capital investment.
The new ion exchange system is more compact, safer and eliminated the gravity feed tank and "the swamp" while reducing the use of floor space.
Accra-Fab is now a much safer and greener company. They continue to demonstrate their corporate values of being good stewards of the environment. They are sold on the benefits of combining Lean and environmental tools to bring measurable improvement to a business.
