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Alternative Energy: Making Dollars and Sense of Energy
 Driven by practical, bottom-line considerations, more manufacturers are getting serious about alternative energy sources.
It was Christmas Eve 2008 and Bob Bechtold had one last project to wrap up before heading home. The president and founder of Ontario, N.Y.-based Harbec Plastics Inc. was working on his green energy consumption report for the U.S. Department of Energy, but something wasn't adding up. Puzzled, he flipped it back to the finance department to check his figures, but he was assured there were no errors. Despite steadily growing the business each year for the past three years, his energy costs had gone down by 35 percent.
"I was absolutely flabbergasted. Even though I've been preaching about it, I never realized how much impact it would have."
While Bechtold admits to harboring a certain tie-died-save-the-Earth-hippy streak, his alternative/Green energy investments at Harbec have all been driven by economics. The custom injection molding company's relationship with alternative sources of energy dates back eight years. At that time, the company was completely reliant on the municipal grid for its power, and "brown-outs" were becoming a significant problem..." Read
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Given the seriously depressed state of domestic economics and reduced consumer spending, initial chemical industry growth coming out of the downturn will "probably be overseas," projects Dr. Kevin Swift, chief economist of the Arlington, Va.-based American Chemistry Council (www.americanchemistry.com).
Following hurricanes in the summer and fall of 2008, "orders did not come back. In some cases, sales and production of key chemicals were off by as much as 30 percent," Swift observes.
U.S. chemical industry sales volumes declined by 3.1 percent in 2008, Swift says. Even though leading economic indicators that forecast six months ahead "show no bottom," he said in late January that he hopes to see some positive movement by this year's third quarter. However, a late November 2008 analysis by the Council forecasts another 3.6 percent drop. "If I were to redo the estimate, I would be decidedly more pessimistic," he concedes.
Overseas, European chemicals have also experienced declines. "For the first time since 2003, the EU [European Union] chemicals industry's output, excluding pharmaceuticals, declined in 2008," notes Dr. Gernot Klotz, executive director of research and innovation of the Brussels-headquartered...
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OPC Foundation Releases Draft Specification for Analyzer Devices Integration
Designed to provide the pharmaceutical industry with a common method for data exchange for analyzer data models, the final release of the ADI specification is expected later this year.
The OPC Foundation (www.opcfoundation.org) , which oversees the OPC open communications standard, announced on Feb. 9 the release of the draft Analyzer Devices Integration (ADI) specification. This new specification provides the pharmaceutical industry with a common method for data exchange for analyzer data models for process and laboratory analyzers... Read
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February 26, 2009
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