Ford Motor Company has reduced the energy used in its plants significantly, according to the company’s annual sustainability report.The company says it reduced the amount of energy needed to produce each vehicle by 22 percent over the last six years. Spokeswoman Marcey Zwiebel says that’s due to conservation in several different departments—like new lighting and new paint booth technologies.“Part of our plan, and a big part of our plan is finding best practices and then replicating them across plants,” she said. “So where we find successes, we find things that are achieving significant results and successes in one plant, we’re rolling those out as best practices and standard processes across other plants.”Zwiebel says updated technology and energy savings don’t result in increased production costs, either.“It’s a more efficient way of running the plants, a more efficient way of doing business and overall, it’s a win-win,” she said.At the Kentucky Truck Plant, managers reduced the amount of waste generated per vehicle by nearly 32 percent from 2007 to 2011—the biggest waste reduction among all the North American plants. Data wasn’t available for the Louisville Assembly Plant, because it’s been offline for parts of the last several years.The company aims to achieve an additional 25 percent drop in energy consumption by 2016.
