Chen of Crystal Window & Door Systems speaks on green practices

Steve Chen, executive vice president with Crystal Window & Door Systems, spoke at the summer meeting of the Northeast Window & Door Association (NWDA) held in Ellicott City, MD. Entitled "Going Green in the Factory," Chen's timely presentation focused on his company's amazing success with implementing environmentally sustainable and energy-efficient practices into daily manufacturing operations. The presentation also highlighted the impressive albeit informal estimation of hundreds of thousands of dollars in operational cost savings and enhanced revenue that has accrued to the company by "going green." Chen's presentation was a detailed review and quantification of the company's efforts over the past few years to introduce green sustainable initiatives into corporate operations. Primarily focused on activities at the company's main factory and administrative headquarters in Flushing, N.Y., the presentation included production equipment, waste recycling, raw materials, building design, building operations and even employee activities. The presentation however did not touch on Crystal's extensive energy efficiency improvements to its broad vinyl and aluminum product line. The quantification effort surrounding the "Going Green in the Factory" presentation resulted in some extremely impressive findings. "We conducted our own in-house analysis of all the energy saving initiatives Crystal has implemented in the past few years, including estimated dollar savings," said Chen. "Although we always knew we were saving money by 'greening' the factory, we were quite pleased with the outcome our analysis showed. And we did this without spending a lot of money on a formal energy consultant, which shows how attainable savings really are with modest effort." Crystal is planning to release the quantification summary of "Going Green" initiatives in an upcoming industry report.