AAR Aircraft Services saves money while becoming greener

• February 15, 2011
  
  

  By April Wilkerson
  The Journal Record
  2/15/2011

  OKLAHOMA CITY – A relatively simple change with a large return on investment has helped AAR Aircraft Services in Oklahoma City become more environmentally friendly.

  The company, which employs 645 people and provides maintenance, repair and overhaul services to airlines at Will Rogers World Airport, bought a $20,000 “sludge press” that makes its wastewater process greener and less expensive. The team leading the change gleaned their ideas through the Lean and Green Institute at the University of Oklahoma.

  Paul Chaney, environment, health and safety manager at AAR in Oklahoma, said that green considerations sometimes go by the wayside when lean initiatives are put into place. Not so with this program and his company’s latest change.

  “This equipment costs pennies to run – it’s powered by air pressure,” he said. “We spent about $20,000 on it, and we’re getting about $36,000 a year in return for this portion of it. It will take about eight and a half months to pay for itself.”

  The sludge press occupies a new step in the company’s wastewater process. AAR uses plenty of water in its etching process, which involves cleaning a plane’s propellers so that no contaminants are left on them and so a new coat of paint will hold. In the past, AAR would treat the resulting wastewater with chemicals to separate the sludge from the clean water. The clean water would then go back to the municipal water system, and AAR would pay a third party to haul off the industrial waste – some 2,000 gallons or 16,680 pounds of sludge a month. At a cost of $1.50 a gallon to send it to a landfill, the costs were mounting, he said.

  In addition, the process wasn’t very environmentally friendly, Chaney said. Because the sludge was still full of water, the heavy metals and other contaminants could be picked up as leachate and enter groundwater streams, he said. Sludge also takes up a lot of room in a landfill.

  “It’s expensive to haul it off because they don’t want liquid in the landfill,” he said. “Leachate can get into the groundwater and it will take everything in the dump with it. So that was part of our motivation – to get rid of the liquid as well as the volume.”

  The sludge press solves that problem. Chaney said he had heard that such technology existed, and he called the manufacturer of the company’s existing water treatment process, Water and Associates in Edmond. The sludge press was installed in a fairly short amount of time, he said, and it has been in use for about a month.

  In the new green process, chemicals are still added to separate the clean water from the slurry, and that clean water is still sent to the municipal water supply. But the slurry now goes through the sludge press, which uses air pressure to squeeze out the water. A dry cake is left behind, and that is the only thing that goes to the landfill, Chaney said. The amount of waste going to the landfill was reduced by 97 percent, or 60,000 pounds.

  Doug Gourley, project manager for AAR, said the process was amazingly easy. He thought the company would have to scour the other parts of its work, such as aircraft washing or etching, to find a savings. As it turns out, they’ve already made those steps as lean as they can, while still following guidelines set by the customer and the Federal Aviation Administration. The only other option was to analyze the wastewater process.

  “What surprised me was the small size of the equipment and how fast it was up and running,” Gourley said. “Two or three weeks after we got the approval for it, it was in and working.”

  The next phase of AAR’s lean and green goals is to find a way to reuse the clean water instead of sending it back into the municipal supply. That means solving a logistics problem so that it becomes financially feasible to transfer the clean water to any of the company’s six hangars that need it. It’s likely to be a challenge, Chaney said, because water is already inexpensive.

  AAR’s recent savings means it can be that much more competitive in an industry that’s already competitive, Chaney said. AAR’s environment encourages such improvements, he said, but it hasn’t always been that way in the aviation industry.

  “We are a target-rich environment,” he said. “A lot of organizations have done things the same way they’ve always done them. We’re so customer-driven that the green elements can get overlooked sometimes. But that is changing rapidly.”

  Shawna McWaters-Khalousi leads the green initiatives at the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, which uses stimulus money to provide scholarships to company representatives to attend Lean and Green training. That money runs out at the end of 2012, she said, so they’re hoping to introduce as many people as possible to the concept.

  “Lean principles have been around for years, and they’ve shown to be very cost-effective and help companies do a lot of good things,” she said. “But what Lean and Green does is to add an intentional environmental benefit to whatever they’re doing to lean the process. Adding the green makes the symbiosis of the two so you’re getting a much greater benefit than you would with either alone.”

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