Through its building products subsidiary CertainTeed LLC, Saint-Gobain North America has upgraded key equipment throughout its insulation plant in Athens, Georgia. The project is projected to save over 7,300 MWh of energy and 20 million gallons of water annually, while reducing landfill waste by over 5,000 MT.
Saint-Gobain North America’s top overall sustainability project for 2023, the CertainTeed project is part of the company’s global Grow and Impact strategy. These efforts include ambitious environmental sustainability goals, such as reducing the company’s consumption of energy and water at its facilities and diverting waste from landfills. The company aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
Pennsylvania-based CertainTeed’s Athens facility, which began operations in 1975, has upgraded key equipment used in the production of loose-fill insulation, including modifications to the facility’s loose-fill recycling machine. In addition, the plant has installed several new pieces of equipment including a new baler, water sub-metering system, three air compressors, efficiency pumps on cooling towers and a cooling wind fan.
“The work of our insulation plant in Athens is the perfect example of what sustainability looks like for industrial manufacturing operations, where a series of small changes brought together can make a huge impact.”
— Jay Bachmann, VP/General Manager, CertainTeed Interior Products Group
“While Saint-Gobain is focused on providing the leading light and sustainable building solutions to customers around the world, we are also committed to minimizing the environmental impact of our production processes,” said Jay Bachmann, Vice President and General Manager of CertainTeed Interior Products Group. “The work of our insulation plant in Athens is the perfect example of what sustainability looks like for industrial manufacturing operations, where a series of small changes brought together can make a huge impact.”
Saint-Gobain Grows In Convers, Social Circle, Peachtree City, Dublin
CertainTeed’s Athens project follows other recent investments that Saint-Gobain has undertaken in Georgia. Earlier this month, the company celebrated the opening of a new CertainTeed Architectural facility in Conyers. Co-located with finishing partner QPC, the facility will allow the company to drastically reduce the distance products must travel to finalize production, reducing carbon emissions.
A sister site to CertainTeed Architectural’s existing facility in nearby Norcross, the Conyers site will produce CertainTeed’s High Profile SeriesTM, Terminus, and HeartFelt® lines. Currently, the Norcross facility ships its products to QPC’s location in Dallas, Texas for coating and finishing. By co-locating CertainTeed and QPC together in Conyers later this year, Saint-Gobain will save over 211,000 truck miles per year, which equates to a reduction of over 50 million pounds of CO2 emissions annually.
