At last year’s Green Business / PricewaterhouseCoopers Executive Roundtable on Sustainability, Ryan Fabi shared with attendees how the culture at Husky Injection Molding Systems Ltd. had changed since it was purchased by Onex Corporation. Fabi, Director of Environment, Health and Safety (EH&S), had only been at the job a short time then and has since seen a number of changes in the organization. Green Business caught up with him recently to talk about some of the changes.

Green Business: What has been the biggest change for you in your organization since we last spoke?

Ryan Fabi: Probably the biggest change for me is that the EH&S function went global back in October, which is a new approach for Husky. Now, all EH&S people are reporting to me.

GB: Congratulations. What was your team’s first move as a cohesive group?

Fabi: We put together our first EH&S action plan that everyone is following. In the past, each location just built their own plan, and if they needed any help they’d talk to people here in Bolton, but there was never an official reporting structure. Now, we’re working together on a number of initiatives.

For instance, in December my VP was keen on developing a new environmental responsibility legacy for us. As you know Husky is a very Green company.  That being said we wanted to enhance our environmental program to include Carbon Neutrality because Husky is always leading edge and we wanted to do more.  He asked me to put together long-range goals, something that would stand apart from a year-to-year goal. We want something that’s aggressive that we can promote and put ourselves out there with other companies that are currently doing what we’re doing. We’ve developed a 2009-2025 plan to gradually go carbon neutral – 2025 being the carbon neutral date. We’ve managed to determine a baseline year of 2006, and we’ve done greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories for the years following that. We’re up to date to 2008. As a company, we’ve never done that before.

GB: That is certainly ambitious. How are you implementing it?

Fabi: We have a bit of a staggered approach; 2006 is the baseline year for Scope 1 and 2 and Scope 3 Business Travel for our four main campuses, which are Bolton, Luxembourg, Milton (Vermont) and Shanghai. In 2010 we’ll start measuring our Scope 1 (direct energy use) and Scope 2 (indirect energy use – i.e. utilities) for all the other smaller facilities we have. So that’s at least another five or six buildings. Also in 2010 we’ll include the remaining bulk of Scope 3 measures (commuting distance and waste etc.) for all the buildings. I felt a staggered approach, giving us breathing room to start thinking this way and begin these projects, was the best way to go.

GB: A number of companies I’ve talked to are working towards driving such initiatives into their value chain – in other words, convincing their suppliers to adopt the same measures. Is that something that is on your radar yet?

Fabi: Driving this through the value chain – especially with suppliers I’m dealing with regularly – is something we’re certainly having conversations about, but it’s not where our energy is being concentrated right now. For instance, our food service contractor at the Bolton facility is always thinking about green initiatives and will be looking for more opportunities to source from locally grown products for our cafeterias.

GB: Employee engagement has been important at Husky since its inception. How are you continuing that under the new corporate structure.

Fabi: At the roundtable, I talked a bit about our Greenshares program, which was put on hold when Onex bought the company. We’ve since reintroduced that, in a slightly altered form, which we felt was important. The Greenshares program formerly awarded staff shares in the company based on their demonstration of environmental responsibility. Since we are no longer a public company we couldn’t offer shares to employees so instead we have developed a point system that are linked to awards at the end of the year.  

GB: At ENEX this past year, a conference and tradeshow Green Business parent company CLB Media hosts with the Excellence in Manufacturing Consortium, there was a lot of discussion about the challenge of creating a sustainable energy management mindset among employees. Are you doing anything special to encourage employees to think about energy efficiency?

Fabi: Husky has always been pretty strong with respect to energy efficiency, but there’s always room for improvement. The Greenshares program rewards team members for environmental responsibility.  Team members generate points by shutting off computers and lights to conserve energy.  Our goal with this program has been and will continue to be educating team members on how to minimize their carbon footprint at home and at work and rewarding them for their efforts.  Also, we recently completed an energy challenge among our four main facilities. These challenges will continue periodically throughout the year.  The goal was to reduce the average daily kilowatt usage at the facility. Whoever reduced their consumption by the greatest percentage was to receive a free lunch paid for by the other facilities. This generated a lot of interest among the facilities. The facilities managers would even email updates to their employees so that they would know where they stood.

Shanghai ended up winning – beating out Lux by a slim margin of about one per cent.

GB: That sounds very positive. Now what’s your next challenge?

Fabi: For Husky we are continuing to provide leading edge solutions by designing products that minimize the carbon footprint and operational costs of our customers.

For EHS, our challenge is to develop carbon credits through our donations program with activities that may directly affect our carbon neutral status.  This means that Husky will consider all requests for donations and if they match our carbon neutral requirements we will attempt to legitimately create carbon offset programs through an environmental consultant to take advantage of the carbon credits that we are supporting.  Examples of this include, sponsoring forestry projects & recycling programs that are coordinated by local charitable organizations. Other means of generating carbon offsets is by developing a program around our already existing energy auditing service for our customers.  Husky engineers will work with the customer to reduce their energy needs.  Husky will look at ways to take advantage of these audits to gain carbon credits.

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