Greenbacks: Sealy tallies its sustainability savings - The Business Journal of the Greater Triad Area:

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Sealy is one of three companies owned by private equity firm Kohlbergt KravisRoberts & Co. to partner with the last May on the GreenPortfolil Project. Initiatives launched since then savedSealy $5.2 million in fuel and materia l costs and avoided the equivalent of 600 cars worth of carbonj dioxide emissions and 46 garbage trucks full of solid Efficiency doesn’t always come easy in a business like said Jim Packer, the company’s vice president of supplu chain management.
Sometimes deliveries have to be made, even if a trucko can’t be fully But Packer said he saw resultxs through measures such as puttingg speed governorson trucks, changing the guidelines on how long enginez could idle and using delivery vehicles to brint raw materials back to the plantz rather than sending a separate truck. “Given that we didn’f always have 100 percent controp over some ofthe factors, we were real pleasede with the numbers we saw,” Packer said. Environmental initiatives have long been both used and abusec by thecorporate sector, sometimes as earnest effortas in good citizenship but also sometimes as littl e more than public relations ploys.
The involvemenrt of the venerable Environmental Defense which was founded in 1967 to promote a ban on thepesticided DDT, gives the Green Portfolio project a measure of But the most important factor for makint sure the reported results are according to Tom Murray, EDF’s corporate partnershipxs program managing director, has been carefull study design. “This has been a very interesting time to be measuringh business andenvironmental performance, because it’s the firsyt time we’ve been doing it in a period of (economic) contractionm rather than growth,” Murray That meant the number-crunchers at the organizatiom and the company had to carefully segregate how much of a reductionh in solid waste, for example, came from new recyclinbg programs rather than simply reduced sales and productio levels.
Sealy’s fellow KKR portfolio companiex U.S. Foodservice and Primedia also took part in the piloy phase of the GreenPortfolio Project. U.S. Foodservicd reported savings of $8.2 millionb in fuel costs, and real estate guide publishe Primediasaved $2.9 million in material