Social Responsibility

Delphi Wins New York 'Green' Award

Delphi's Lockport, NY plant was recently recognized by the state of New York for making great strides towards reducing the facility's impact on the environment.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) awarded Delphi's Lockport facility with the 2007 Environmental Excellence Award for making great efforts toward improving and protecting New York's environment.

Background
Delphi previously used a hexavalent chromium coating to provide corrosion protection on some automotive components. Regulations and customer requirements enacted in 2003 required the elimination of its use in order to meet European legislation in early 2007. Products made by Thermal, along with purchased parts at the Lockport facility were affected by the ban.

Solution
This changing legislation prompted Thermal to search for alternative coatings as well as other solutions with various suppliers. After investigating the overall environmental and financial impact of these solutions, an alternative aluminum material system was selected for Lockport manufactured products. As a result, the Lockport facility was able to discontinue manufacturing the coated components in Oct. 2005. In total, 29 Delphi manufactured and purchased parts were modified to exclude hexavalent chromium.

Savings
As a result of eliminating the coating process, the Lockport facility was able to close its waste water treatment plant. With the closure, the Lockport site will see an annual elimination of 1.1 million pounds of treatment chemicals and 200 tons of hazardous sludge disposal. There are further site utility savings of 4 million gallons of purchased water, 3.4 million kilowatt hours of electricity and 240 thousand cubic feet of natural gas. These annual savings of utilities and elimination of hazardous sludge disposal are a large benefit to both the local and state environments. The closure also created the benefits of reducing noise, odor and traffic to the local area.

"It takes a team effort to make important changes to benefit our environment," said Scott Kitkowski, Delphi's divisional U.S. operations director. "Product, manufacturing and environmental engineering came together with the quality and manufacturing operations to make a significant environmental and financial impact for the company."

On a global level, the material system Lockport used to replace the coating is commercially available for other manufacturers to use. The elimination of the chromate coating process has now spread to other Delphi manufacturing facilities in Europe.