Westborough Firm Plugs Into Energy Efficiency

A Westborough-based expansion joint manufacturing company was certified this fall for changes many people can make at home.

EMSEAL Joint Systems Ltd. installed energy efficient lightbulbs, and recycling bins,  among other environmentally friendly changes, over six months earlier this year, Director of Business Development Dennis Callahan says.

The Central Massachusetts Sustainable Business Leader program certified the Bridle Lane firm this fall.

“Each company tries to look at what they’re producing, and then look at the energy that’s being used, and then as a business try to determine how you can do that better – how to make the company as energy efficient as it can be, and also how to make the people within the company follow practices and lifestyles,” voluntarily, that do the same, Callahan explains.

EMSEAL President and CEO Lester Hensley was “looking for years to make the company more sustainable the way that a lot of large companies should be operating,” Callahan says.

The firm has been at its Bridle Lane site for about four years, moving from space next door, he says.

EMSEAL has been retrofitting its current space to better suit the firm’s needs, Callahan says.

Pursuing Sustainable Business Leader certification was a six-month project that began in January.

“One of the key things was everyone was on board,” Callahan says.

“The guys in the factory, they fully bought into it, so they changed what the lighting procedures were. We have a real good factory team because they try to operate in the most efficient way that they can.”

EMSEAL’s business employees “saw the money that could be saved,” he adds.

“The amazing thing for us is the amount of money that we saved. Even if you wonder if green is the way to go, from a business point of view, the bottom line, we’re making all of our investments back,” Callahan says.

Recycling has “dropped our trash costs in half,” he says.

“Basically, we were paying to throw everything away,” he says.

EMSEAL also shares with its employees information about energy efficiency tasks they can do at home.

EMSEAL used energy audit machines on its devices, for example, and then told employees that “anyone who wants to bring that home and do it in the own house, go ahead,” he says.

NSTAR partners with Prism, which handled the energy conversion, he says.

Prism does an energy audit of the firm, and NSTAR will “assume 80 percent of the cost to make all those changes,” he says.

EMSEAL appealed to the program “because we don’t have so many lights” for a “giant energy conversion,”and is ”not so small” to warrant just “changing a few lights,” he says.

“They walked in and saw this and said, ‘This is the kind of company that we want to be in,” Callahan says.

“They can maximize their conversion on a facility like this.”