Operational Excellence Stories

Hexion has a strong history of driving improvements in our energy, water and waste intensities and recently upgraded our energy, water and waste management program to reach all sites.

In 2020, we completed 52 improvement projects across the globe to reduce our footprint in these critical areas. We also held sessions at 23 sites identifying about 125 actionable projects that could further improve our energy and water intensity and reduce waste generation. As our success is driven by our associates, we have included associates at all levels in these ideation sessions, expanded our employee engagement through improved communication of our climate change efforts, provided materials and training around our sustainability efforts and upgraded our key metrics platform so our associates are better equipped to identify and drive improvements.

Water is a critical natural resource as well as essential to our industrial plants which use water as an ingredient in products, for process cooling and for the production of steam. Our productivity and operation teams continually evaluate projects to efficiently use natural resources and optimize our existing processes such as reducing overall water usage or allowing for recycling of wastewater in lieu of fresh water. Hexion has also committed to performing a water risk assessment for our sites located in water distressed areas during 2021.

Initiative Offsets Freshwater Purchases and Waste Treatment Costs

Mar 9, 2020, 15:51 PM by User Not Found

The Geismar plant had a need to reduce costs for interplant truck transfers, and had rainwater that was captured on site, but could not be used. By thinking outside of the box, and recognizing that the one pipeline could help both challenges a team of associates found a creative way to use 4.8 MM gallons of rainwater, offsetting freshwater purchases and waste treatment costs. That is ten times more annually than in prior years!

A project team of operations and Six Sigma associates set out to identify and implement solutions to reduce truck transfers of product between two physical locations separated by nearly ½ mile. These transfers were required to meet customer demands at the two separate locations.

Through their investigation, the project team identified that a pipeline would not only eliminate trucked interplant transfers, but could also be used to transfer rainwater captured in the tank farm area between the two locations for beneficial reuse in the process and the necessary flushing of the piping after each transfer.

As a result of this pipeline not only was the site able to increase their rainwater consumption, but were able to eliminate 1,812 truck shipments annually between the two locations and the resulting fuel use, CO2 emissions and potential safety and environmental exposures.

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