Compressed Air Best Practices - September 2008 - (Page 47) Compressed Air Industry FOOD PACKAGING & PROCESSING | 09/08 | Meat processing and packaging is very important to us. We work with a pork processing plant that processes 33,000 pigs a day. Poultry plants are common here and we have the top two turkey processing plants in the country as our customers. We also have a huge hamburger processing and packaging plant we work with. CO2 O Is the Textile Industry hanging in there? We see the textile industry rebounding in North Carolina. We have seen textile firms come back to North Carolina after having “given it a try” in Mexico, Vietnam, Guatemala, Pakistan, and China — to name a few. We have an air-jet weaving plant which is re-opening after having been offshore. The yarn, yarn dyeing, and high-tech textile industries all seem to be coming back. We do know one large corporation continuing to try to get out as fast as they can — but we are seeing an overall rebound for textile. North Carolina has a long history with textile, meaning a trained labor force and modern infrastructures to support it. Few industrial users understand the energy costs associated with their compressed air system. What other industries are in North Carolina? There are many of course. Microelectronics has grown in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle. The automotive (Tier 2 and 3) industry is also growing here. Factories are going in on county roads with no sign out front but with a lot of trucks coming and going. It’s difficult to find out what’s going on in there but invariably we discover it’s a parts manufacturer for the automotive industry. What’s the #1 piece of advice you’d give a plant manager. We always advise our customers to get an understanding of what their compressed air system is costing them. For those of us in the industry, the topic has been there for a lot of years. For our industrial air users, very few understand the energy costs associated with their compressed air system. One time after a walk-through of a facility, I gave a Plant Manager a very conservative estimate of what his compressed air system was costing him in energy usage. The Plant Manager became so upset at the number I gave him he refused to believe me. When I insisted (it was a very straight-forward installation) he showed me the door to his facility! During our seminars we usually ask the attendees if they know what they energy cost of their compressed air system is. Usually one out of twenty attendees is close with his estimate. Many have no idea at all. We always give out a free Starbucks card to the winner! Air Flow, Inc., has an Airend Rebuild Shop in Woodleaf, North Carolina. kW How about Meat Processing? w www .airbe s t ra c e ww .ai rbe stp rac tic es. com e actic m 47 http://www.airbestpractices.com
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