Talking Heads

Steve Cooper

Steve Cooper is sustainable design director at Armstrong Fluid Technology

A singular proposition

Steve Cooper has been at the heart of a sustainability drive since 2013. As he tells EiBI it is still evolving and developing as global environmental demands change

The project began back in 2013. It’s still going strong in 2021 and is likely to continue for many years to come.

Steve Cooper was a key driving force behind Planet Proposition, Armstrong Fluid Technology’s group-wide sustainability drive. The scheme has been so successful that the manufacturer of intelligent fluid flow equipment for the HVAC sector has recently won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise for Sustainable Development.

“Prior to this there were various environmental improvement initiatives underway in Armstrong sites across the world,” Cooper told EiBI. “Establishing the Planet Proposition allowed us to standardise measurement and set targets across the group. It also created a network in which sites could learn from one another and pass on best practice.

“Armstrong leadership teams in Canada, USA, China, India and the UK signed up to an environmental charter, and a network of Sustainability Champions was established to co-ordinate the activities driven by teams at each Armstrong site. Planet Proposition now involves every employee at every site, drives the development of new Armstrong products, and governs the ways in which we engage with local and business communities,” Cooper stated.

Comprehensive monitoring

Planet Proposition addresses some key United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), so the objectives and vision for the initiative are far-reaching. The charter has three pillars:

Pillar 1, Solutions: (development of equipment which helps our customers minimise lifecycle carbon footprint of buildings, at the same time as offering lowest installed cost and lowest operational cost)

Pillar 2, Environment: (measuring our performance and minimising our own consumption of resources)

Pillar 3, Community: (helping the community at large become more sustainable)

Comprehensive monitoring was introduced across Armstrong sites in 2014. Data loggers installed on gas, electricity and water meters feed through to Armstrong’s ECO*Pulse platform to provide current and historical consumption data.

KPIs have been introduced to measure and reduce the following at each Armstrong site: total electricity consumption; total CO2 emissions; total natural gas consumption; total diesel consumption; total water consumption; and total waste to landfill.

“Our goal has been to reduce our energy consumption by 25 per cent between 2014 and 2020, and we have now achieved this,” Cooper said. “Total greenhouse gas emissions also fell from 4,508 in 2018 to 3,028 tCO2e in 2020.

“To work towards this ambitious target in the UK we upgraded to LED lighting at both our factories, and invested in the installation of a 250kWp solar PV system for on-site generation at our site in Manchester. The solar photovoltaic panels, covering a roof area of 1,550m2, enabled the factory to generate 201,113kWh of electricity in 2020, 171,213kWh of which were consumed in the plant and 29,029 kWh exported to the grid. The solar PV system provided 40 per cent of the plant’s total requirement in 2020. Between commissioning of the system in 2016 and the end of 2020, a total of 969,274kWh of solar energy was generated.”

But Cooper is determined to push Armstrong on to further levels of energy saving. In 2019, Armstrong signed the Net Zero Carbon Buildings Commitment, a programme launched by the World Green Building Council. As a signatory to the programme, Armstrong has pledged to ensure that all its offices and manufacturing facilities operate at net-zero carbon by the year 2030. “In addition, in June 2018 we announced a commitment to reduce GHG emissions among our installed customer base by 2m tons by the year 2022, challenging industry participants to set

Cooper: 'the HVAC sector will need to find ways of integrating emerging technologies' similarly aggressive targets for the same four-year time frame,” Cooper declared. “One area of focus for us in the coming years is the development of detailed LCAs (Life Cycle Assessments) for our products.”

The organisation’s supply chain is also coming under pressure to work alongside. “We are certainly encouraging our suppliers and customers to work towards environmental improvement, and are providing enabling technologies and sharing best practice to help them move forward with their own initiatives. We are currently preparing a Sustainable Procurement initiative which we will roll out to key supply chain partners by the end of 2021.

Inter-company collaboration

Although most organisations have had a tough time during the pandemic Cooper is sure that some good is coming out of it. “I think there is a growing appreciation of sustainability as a much broader concept than just energy saving. The areas of intercompany collaboration and involvement with communities, that Planet Proposition is built upon, have come to the fore through the pandemic.”

To build on this Cooper believes that government has a key role to play in promoting the sustainability agenda. “The government has done quite a bit as a start,” he said. “Supporting the implementation of the technologies that already exist would be a key area for government assistance, enabling those implementing the technologies to make a return on their investment. Incentive programmes should focus on facilitating the structural changes needed for innovation and implementation as well as helping families caught up in fuel poverty.”

The support for new technology is likely to be accompanied by pressure on manufacturers to develop new solutions. “We expect to see a number of new technologies emerging in the coming years that will create technical challenges for our sector,” Cooper stated. “As our industry experienced with the emergence of renewable energy solutions such as solar and ground source heat pump some years ago, the HVAC sector will need to find ways of integrating emerging and existing technologies effectively and seamlessly, to deliver the ambitious carbon reductions that customers want to achieve.” 