Nestle Waters North America – Jenny McColloch – 2011

Justin Lindenmayer and Jenny McColloch spent their summer at the corporate headquarters of Nestlé Waters North America (NWNA), the leading bottled water company in North America.

As NWNA has already implemented significant energy efficiency projects across its 27 retail water bottling facilities, Lindenmayer and McColloch instead focused on sniffing out hidden savings opportunities at corporate headquarters, which just recently earned LEED Gold Certification, and at a recently acquired tea bottling plant in Ohio.

Their projects, many of which have been implemented already, included recommendations for powering down garage lamps during daylight hours, installing timers on bottled water refrigerators, better optimizing existing occupancy sensors and swapping incandescent exit signs for LEDs. All told, these simple and extremely low cost projects could save the company over 208,000 kwh and 80 metric tons of CO2 per year, and approximately $127,000 in electricity costs.

In addition, Lindenmayer and McColloch spent significant time working on larger-picture energy efficiency strategy initiatives, including the establishment of an energy and water-efficiency tracking system at the new tea plant, an investigation of a potential revolving loan fund for ongoing energy efficiency investments, and a survey of all bottling plants to facilitate the engineering team’s optimization of heat exchange in the water production equipment. While the benefits of these projects are impossible to quantify in the short-term, they will nevertheless be critical in advancing energy efficiency projects company-wide well into the future.