As a utility boiler operator for FiberMark’s Brattleboro plant, I deal firsthand with energy issues.  I operate the boiler that provides process steam for a lot of the plant machinery.  In the course of doing that, I’m also involved in our increasing use of waste vegetable oil—filtering it, heating it, pumping it into the right tanks, and maximizing our use of it.   “WVO,” as we call it, is one of my company’s major energy and environmental efforts.

I’ve been with FiberMark for 27 years.  My home is in Keene, New Hampshire, right across the Connecticut River from Brattleboro, although I was born and raised in the small town of Wardsboro, Vermont.

Vermont isn’t a particularly industrialized state, and, as a result, people here have had a lot of hardships through the generations.  But those hardships have made us hard-working and frugal, and, because we haven’t had a lot, it’s in our nature to conserve.

And with conservation in mind, the WVO project is a real winner.  I’m happy that management here has given us is the freedom to blend the mixture of WVO and Number 6 oil that we burn.  We do that according to what amounts of WVO we can collect from neighboring towns and cities and what we have on hand—some days we burn maybe 30 percent WVO as a percentage of our overall mix, and other days it’s 40 or 50 percent.

There’s another aspect of our focus on energy conservation.  When we make paper for our products, we bring in water from the river through our sand-filtered system.  If we bring it in during the summer, that water temperature is already around 70 degrees, so it means that we have to heat the water that much less—and, of course, burn less fuel in the process.  In the winter, we bring the water in from our deep well, and that’s consistently 50 degrees.  So, again, we’re always making adjustments to try and decrease our plant’s operating “carbon footprint” as we refer to it nowadays.

The goal is simple:  a cleaner burn with fewer emissions.  It makes sense, and it’s right in keeping with the Vermont tradition of conservation we’re trying to uphold.  A lot of people may not be aware of it as yet, but it’s becoming a FiberMark tradition to.