Climate Leaders Q&A: Tennant Company

In this month’s Climate Leaders Q&A, Climate Action interviews Sven Tolen, ec-H20 and sustainability expert for Tennant Company.

Tennant Company is a world leader in designing, manufacturing and marketing solutions that help create a cleaner, safer world. Its products include equipment for maintaining surfaces in industrial, commercial and outdoor environments; and specialty surface coatings for protecting, repairing and upgrading concrete floors.

In December 2009 Tennant announced it would leverage the assembly of the world’s climate change policy makers by using the COP15 conference in Copenhagen as the backdrop to showcase the company’s innovative technologies for sustainable cleaning of indoor and outdoor environments.

Business magazine Sustainable Industries named Tennant’s ec-H2O™ technology as one of its 2009 Top 10 Green Building Products winners.  Tell us more about ec-H20 technology and its benefits.

It really depends on the application and the cleaning program of the different type of customers; however most compelling benefits for many customers are the Environmental Aspect and also the Savings that can be realized with the technology through increased productivity, elimination of detergents, reduction of burnishing and training.

Safety is the other big benefit. In the attached document you can find more details on the benefits that come with ec-H2O technology.

For many customers it is also the social aspect of doing the right thing, so actually it is about finding the balance between Social, Environmental and Economic Benefits that all outweigh Cleaning with conventional detergents.

Many of today's pressing socio-economic and challenges require multi-stakeholder responses for any impact to be made. How are you partnering with specific or groups of stakeholders in addressing some of these?

We have employee teams at our major operations.  These teams direct local community involvement.  At our headquarters, in 2009 the employee team collected goods and donations for Emergency Foodshelf Network ($26,000), spent 110 volunteer‑hours picking litter from a 1.6KM section of highway and 2.0 KM section of walking path, spent 172 volunteer‑hours cleaning the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum’s parking lots, roads, and trail last the spring, and a household goods drive to support Bridging a local non‑profits which assists displaced families re-establish their household.  We support the Healthy Schools Campaign.  Whose mission is improving the environmental quality of schools through best practices green cleaning. 

Water footprinting is key issue for all businesses as water becomes more scarce. How does Tennant ensure it uses water in a responsible manner?

Water is only a very limited part of Tennant’s production processes. However, Tennant has many environmental programs in place in its facilities to reduce, re-use and recycle when and where possible and then I mean everything that we can influence going from water, to energy, back to back printing, waste programs, material recycling and reusing in production.

Some of our buildings have even Contractors that are contractually asked to use only chemical-free environmental friendly cleaning technologies. This program will be rolled out to all facilities going forward.

For what concerns ec-H2O technology: 3rd party testing has shown that you can clean 70-80% longer with the same amount of water. This means that you can clean a much bigger area with any ec-H2O scrubber-dryer than cleaning with the same size scrubber-dryer with conventional detergents. For Carpet Cleaning, Tennant also has a proprietary technology called ReadySpace that reduces considerably on water and detergent usage.

How does Tennant responsible business practices across your global operations and supply chain management?

We have a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) road map.  We are focused on four key aspects of sustainability: energy reduction; waste reduction, both in our operations and our supply chain; developing cleaning solutions that help our customers create clean and healthy place with environmentally favourable technologies; and, improving the communities in which they operate.  We have a commitment to publish our first CSR report for 2009 in the spring of 2010.  We started our CSR initiative at our headquarters and will be expanding that boundary to all major locations over the coming years.

What is Tennant’s strategy for addressing climate change?

We have completed a greenhouse gas emissions inventory for operations in the United States.  This initial inventory had two objectives: (1) learn how to collect our emissions and calculate CO2 e’s; and (2) affirm that our CO2 e’s were below the EPA’s reporting threshold of 25,000 metric tons.  In 2010 we will expand our inventory’s boundary to Europe and Asia.

Tennant is participating in the WRI’s product GHG LCA road testing.  This will enable us to (1) learn how to calculate a product’s GHG emission over the life of the product, and (2) reply to customer requests for this information. 

Tennant’s contribution to Climate Change is it’s commitment to prioritize the development of existing and new Environmental Friendly Solutions going forward and to market those technologies to its customers. Every year Tennant allocates the biggest percentage in the industry of its sales to R&D. Latest examples of this program is ec-H2O technology that reduces the impact in 7 environmental categories up to 98% and the 500ze, the first battery driven street sweeper operating on LitiumIon battery technology. Activeion Pro and Ionator EXP are 2 hand held sprays that have been licensed by Tennant to a company called Activeion. Those products have also chemical-free cleaning technology integrated to replace many general purpose cleaners.

Tennant aspires to be the global leader in chemical-free cleaning and other technologies to help our customers create a cleaner, healthier world. 

2010 is the year of Biodiversity.  What steps are Tennant taking to minimise the impact on ecosystems and habitats their activities might have?

First we are not building new facilities, so we are not clearing land and our impact on biodiversity in the tradition sense is very low.  Several of our products help our customers reduce impacts on biodiversity by keeping their grounds free of sand, gravel and particulates that would silt water supplies.  These products always remove carbon and braking lining dust as well as antifreeze from roadways keeping these harmful materials out of the water supplies and surrounding fields and open areas.