Champions for Others

ou look to Cheerios to get your day started right. The cereal's maker looks to the leftover oat hulls from making Cheerios to get its own energy boost. General Mills is installing a biomass burner at its oat flour plant in Fridley, Minn. When it comes online in early 2011, the mill's carbon footprint will shrink by 21 percent. According to a story in the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, General Mills' mills in Fridley and Minneapolis produce some 90,000 tons of oat hulls a year. The company plans to use about 10 percent of that total in the biomass boiler. It also sells hulls to a Koda Energy plant in Shakopee, Minn., that uses them to produce brewer's malt.

nother Minnesota company, 3M, is making its own progress in the energy sector, announcing agreements in March with the U.S. Dept. of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado. Among the areas of investigation are thin-film photovoltaics, concentrating solar power (CSP) and biofuels. A week earlier, fellow IAMC firm Alcoa announced its own CSP agreement with NREL, following the recent installation of a CSP parabolic trough at NREL's test facility in Golden, Colo. Instead of glass mirrors, the new Alcoa solution uses highly reflective aluminum mirrors.

Among other recent earth-friendly measures, Alcoa recently dedicated a $24-million expansion of aluminum can recycling capacity at the Company's Tennessee Operations in Alcoa, Tenn. The expansion will increase recycling capability by nearly 50 percent and help secure more than 100 jobs at the facility.

In 2009, Alcoa announced a commitment to work toward increasing recycling rates in North America to 75 percent by 2015.

aterpillar just keeps optimizing. In late March, the company announced a $2.8-million, 18-job expansion of its track components operation in Danville, Ky., that involves the transfer of a product line from its plant in Franklin, N.C. The project is eligible for up to $500,000 in incentives through the Kentucky Reinvestment Act, a program that was expanded in Kentucky Gov. Steve Breshear's Incentives for a New Kentucky bill passed last summer.

Ten days prior, the company announced a slightly bigger project at its electric power division plant in Newberry, S.C., where approximately 500 jobs will be created over the next several years in the manufacture of diesel-powered backup-power generator sets. While the total investment amount was not disclosed, Cat was assisted in its plans by the S.C. Dept. of Commerce, Newberry County and the Central SC Alliance.

In late 2009, Cat celebrated the opening of its new R&D center (pictured below) in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, China. Among its many functions, the new center will have an engine test facility with performance and emissions development capability, an advanced materials laboratory, an electronics laboratory, a system and machine integration facility and validation capability.

"As Caterpillar continues to increase its manufacturing presence in China to support our growing Chinese customer base, it is strategically important to have world-class product development and validation facilities in the region," said Caterpillar Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Tana Utley.

The center is located near Cat's component manufacturing facility in Wuxi, which began production in June 2006, and the company's Wuxi engine campus, which began production in 2009. It is also near Cat's medium-wheel loader and motor grader manufacturing facility in Suzhou, which began production in October 2009.

The Wuxi R&D center is the third such Caterpillar facility in China, joining a center established in 2005 in Qingdao, Shandong Province, for product and process development and a design center in Xuzhou established in 2003. Cat now employs more than 5,800 people in China across 11 manufacturing facilities and 10 business offices.