Governor's Award Application

Founded in 1950, the Leonhardt Plating Company is a family owned and operated electroplating job-shop in Cincinnati. The company provides a variety of metal finishing services, including polishing, buffing, electroless nickel plating, nickel and chrome electroplating and electropolishing of stainless steel in a 20,000 square foot shop.

Leonhardt Plating currently employs 27 people, and services over 100 customers. Our customers manufacture such items as medical furniture and equipment, store fixtures and displays, automotive accessories, plumbing fixtures, food processing machinery, machine tools and others.

Leonhardt Plating is committed to total quality control and promotes continuous improvement at all levels including environmental. Leonhardt Plating maintains all processes to be in complete compliance within all local, state, and federal environmental protective laws.

Leonhardt Plating won the 1997 Governor’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Pollution Prevention for its dramatically reduction of water use and a proactive pollution prevention program. "Though all the nominations illustrated outstanding examples of pollution prevention, your nomination demonstrated efficiency, innovation, creativity, economy and dedication worthy of note," said Ohio Governor George Voinovich.

Summary

Over a five-year period, through an innovative, continuous program of water and raw material conservation, Leonhardt Plating has dramatically reduced its water usage and embarked on a permanent pollution prevention program.

As a result of concentrated efforts, Leonhardt Plating reduced water usage from 23,000 gallons a day in 1993, to 3,000 gallons a day currently. This resulted in a savings of $5,000 annually on our water bill. Changes included installation of water timers, reduction in the number of rinse tanks, use of counterflow rinses, redesign of the hot water rinse, repiping of wastewater collection, and downsizing of rinse tanks.

In addition to the savings on our water bill, we were able to change our permit with the Cincinnati Metropolitan Sewer District from continuous flow to a batch discharge. This has resulted in a cost saving of $10,000 in deceased discharge monitoring fees.

In January of 1993, we began working with the Chamber’s Strategic Eight strategic planning process. The key to our company’s future was to remain in regulatory compliance. Our brainstorming sessions were aimed at reducing wastewater by making the plating process more efficient. Together our suggestions included timed flow controls, counterflow rinses and flow restrictors. Although water conservation is our first priority, we have also initiated a company-wide waste minimization program to address disposal expenses, liability concerns and recovery/recycling issues. Additional specific actions include:

• Pollution prevention is promoted in Leonhardt Plating’s Environmental Mission Statement. Every employee is given the Environmental Mission Statement and trained on water conservation and waste minimization. Participation from employees has contributed to the overall success of this effort.
• When we purchased equipment for new processes in 1995 and 1998, we invested in a closed loop system that creates no wastewater discharges.
• We reduced our chrome usage from 700 pounds annually to 400 pounds for the same amount of production output, for a saving of $753 in raw materials.
• Our president, Dan Leonhardt, was one of the founders of Institute of Advanced Manufacturing Sciences’ Electroplaters Environmental Collaborative. Leonhardt Plating participates in the monthly collaborative meetings, to share our experience and learn new ways to continuously improve our performance.

In 1993, the first duty performed by the operator each morning was to turn on all the water within the plant. All rinses continued to flow all day until quitting time, when the operator would close the main valve as the last duty of the day. Although, water savers were installed on all the rinse tanks in an attempt to reduce water usage, they became clogged and ultimately failed. The operators eventually drilled these water savers out to allow for more flow into the rinse tanks. Another attempt to conserve water was posting a sign above the main valve reminding operators to close the valve during breaks and lunch. This was not successful in reducing water usage.

We were using water in three different systems. The first was bath make-up and replacement for evaporation loss in the plating tanks and their closed looped rinse tanks. This water runs through a deionized exchange cylinder to remove impurities. The deionized water is piped throughout the shop to fill plating tanks and rinses. All the plating rinses are closed looped, and piped through a heavy metal exchange cylinder. None of the deionized water is discharged into the sewer.

The second area of water usage was the cleaning stage of the plating process. We focused our attention on this area because it accounted for over 95 percent of our discharged wastewater.

The last source of water usage was used in a continuous flow hot water rinse following the chrome rinse tank. This water was discharged into the sewer as wastewater.

The wastewater from the cleaning rinses discharged from the tanks and spilled into a trough that ran under the plating area. The trough was funneled into a sump that was pumped to a holding tank. The wastewater settled in the holding tank and discharged into the sewer. This was a potential problem because any spill from the process tanks to the floor might contaminate the wastewater.

A water timer and solenoid valve was installed to deliver a fixed quantity of water to each rinse tank. We purchased these inexpensive items at a local home improvement store. We have an indoor sprinkler system that feeds water to any of our plating rinses at the most critical times to give good quality rinsing.

The water lines are now piped to a central location connecting the feed for each cleaning line. A solenoid valve is installed at the beginning of each line, and wired to the water timer.

The water timer allows us to control the amount of water to each of our five plating rinses. The amount of water needed is dependent of the size and quantity of parts run, and the times that the parts are run. We found that more water is needed before breaks and lunch breaks. Less water is needed for small flat parts. Any line can be turned off or on per water required.

Reduction in Number of Rinse Tanks

After scrutinizing the rinse tank layout, we decided that two rinses following the acid tank were not necessary. We removed one rinse with no noticeable change in the quality of rinsing. This eliminated three flowing rinses and saved $3,000 in water cost annually.

Counterflow Rinses

We decided that the soak rinse was the dirtiest and needed the most water. The electroclean and acid rinse wastewater were fairly clean. We decided to reuse this water by collecting it and pumping it back to the soak rinse.

The wastewater from the electroclean and acid rinses overflows into a sump barrel that is pumped back to be reused in the soak rinse. This achieves our objectives of reusing fairly clean water and also doubled the amount of flow for our dirtiest rinse tank without using fresh city water.

Redesign Hot Water Rinse

A flowing hot water rinse followed the closed looped chrome rinse tanks. The final chrome rinse was piped into a holding tank and pumped through a heavy metal exchange cylinder that removed the heavy metals in the water and before sending it back to the final chrome rinse. We decided to combine the chrome rinse water into the final hot water rinse.

We repiped the final chrome rinse through the heavy metal exchange cylinder and into the hot water heater. The water is heated and runs into the final rinse and overflows to the supply source for the earlier chrome rinse. This is a closed looped process and none of the final rinse is discharged into the sewer.

Repipe of Wastewater Collection

Another major improvement was the piping of the wastewater directly to the collection sump for each line. Now if the pH is running high or low, we can easily test the wastewater discharge of each plating line to quickly determine where the problem is occurring and rectify it.

Rinse Tank Updated

We looked at each rinse tank to determine its size and condition. Most of these rinse tanks were steel and needed to be repaired. The replacement tanks are made of polypropylene or fiberglass.

The new tank size was important because the larger the volume of water, the more water was needed to keep a fresh clean tank. We purchased the smallest size tanks which could still accommodate our parts. The new tanks were required to have weirs to capture any solids or oil that floated on top of the water.

A save rinse after the chrome tank was converted to a spray rinse. The chrome is collected in the tank and added back to the chrome plating tank. This is saving us 200 pounds in the cost of chrome.

Environmental Benefits

The reduction in wastewater has allowed Leonhardt Plating to change its current continuous wastewater discharge permit to a single daily batch tank discharge. By capturing all wastewater in a batch tank, Leonhardt Plating can avoid a potential spill discharge into the sewer. A daily record log of pH, temperature, volume, start and stop time of each discharge, and name of operator is maintained.

Batch discharge has caused us to operate more efficiently by reducing our operating and monitoring costs. We have used these cost savings to improve recycling and reduction of our wastewater. Batch discharges also benefits MSD as a result of decreased paperwork, inspector’s time, and wear and tear on MSD equipment.

Leonhardt Plating has made a commitment not to generate any more wastewater. In 1995 and 1998 we installed new electropolish processes that are completely closed looped from the sewer. All the rinsewater is piped through a heavy metal exchange cylinder and reused in the process.

The addition of the chrome spray rinse has reduced chrome wastes by 300 pounds annually.

Management Commitment

Pollution prevention is promoted in Leonhardt Plating’s Environmental Mission Statement. Every employee is given the Environmental Mission Statement and trained on water conservation and waste minimization. We have made a commitment to protect our employees and the community by exploring new ideas and practices that are pollution prevention.

In 1997, on behalf of the International Visitors Council of Greater Cincinnati, Leonhardt Plating hosted a group of African environmentalist touring the United States to focus on environmental protection issues. Leonhardt Plating was chosen as a tour site for its successful recycling and pollution reduction programs.

Transferability

This project appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Cincinnati Post. We have submitted articles in national trade journals.

We have conducted three presentations on this subject to share our experience and results with others. A presentation at an IAMS Waste Reduction Seminar, entitled Leonhardt Plating’s Waste Reduction Assessment took place on October 24, 1995. A presentation was given to the Southwest Ohio Water Environment Association 1997 Industrial Waste Seminar on January 30, 1997, entitled Meeting Effluent Limits And Saving Money Through P2. Another talk was given on April 15, 1997, at 6th Annual Business and Industry’s Environmental Symposium at the Cincinnati Convention Center titled One-Person Environmental Department.

The Cincinnati Enquirer and Cincinnati Post praised us for our pollution prevention accomplishments.

In a December 20, 1997 Cincinnati Post editorial on preventing pollution, Leonhardt Plating was praised for making their operations environmentally efficient and boosting its bottom line.

We were featured in the summer 1998 Pollution Prevention Review entitled Preventing Pollution with Industry Collaboratives.

We were featured in a video produced in 1998 by the Ohio EPA’s Division of Hazardous Waste Management entitled "An Ounce of Prevention: The Advantages of Reducing Waste".

Over the last five years, business has doubled. This proves that pollution prevention worked for Leonhardt Plating as our costs decreased and sales increased.

We anticipate an immediate cost saving of $10,000 as a result of decreased discharge monitoring fees. In addition, we will also experience a cost saving in the amount of water we buy and raw materials we purchase.

The long term cost savings will boost the company’s growth potential and long-term survival. We have reduced the company’s liability and projected a company image of being socially and environmental responsible. It has helped retain and attract environmentally conscious customers. We are providing the legacy of a cleaner environment for future generation.