Dave Bowers
President
Woodex Bearing Company
Georgetown, Maine

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Our company manufactures maintenance and replacement parts for industrial process machinery. Woodex's bearings and mechanical shaft seals, which are used in a wide range of equipment and industries, are designed to extend the service life of machinery and improve its operational efficiency, while improving the equipment's ability to contain ingredients within the process vessel.

Woodex is located in a small, island community on the Maine coast, and as such has little direct influence on the sustainability (or lack of same) of cities. In a microcosmic sense, though, Woodex conducts its operations with the interests of the local community in mind. We hire local people where possible, use local suppliers and subcontractors where available, and contribute actively to the community's non-profit organizations. Fifty percent of the town's daytime volunteer ambulance personnel are Woodex employees, and the company pays them while they are on ambulance and fire calls. Woodex is a regular contributor to a local scholarship fund. Woodex employees sit on the Citizens' Advisory Committee to the local vocational/technical school's drafting program, in hopes of providing input which will enable the local school system to provide graduates who are suited to employment with Woodex.

In a larger sense, Woodex seeks to sustain it's customers' communities by designing and manufacturing products which improve the compatibility of the process facilities which sustain a given community's population, with the local environment. Woodex's products are designed to make industrial process machinery more environmentally-friendly, and to increase the operational efficiency of the processing plant as a whole, thereby conserving resources and reducing its environmental impact. As an example, Woodex's MECO mechancial shaft seals used in pulp and paper process machinery, consume up to one-fifth the amount of cooling water as the conventional packing gland seals which are traditionally used. This reduces the load on the paper mill's water treatment facility, and improves the quantity and quality of the local water supply.

MECO seals on a polymer dryer at a Phillips 66 plastic production facility successfully contain n-methyl pyrrholidone, an extremely aggressive aromatic hydrocarbon which causes severe local environmental damage when accidentally released.

By reducing the friction load of rotating shafts, MECO seals correspondingly reduce the horsepower requirement to drive them, and thus the electricity demand, of the plant. By containing hazardous materials within process machinery, Woodex's products help to make it's customers' communities more habitable.

Through improving the overall operational efficiency of process plants, Woodex aids in increasing the profitability of process industries, while also improving the overall environment in the community. The increase in profitability is, to Woodex, the most crucial point in the sustainability of any given community: if commerce and industry are not profitable, the source of jobs for the community will fail, or move away. If commerce and industry are not cognizant of and friendly to the local environment, the labor force will fail or move away.

While Woodex continually seeks sources of renewable and recyclable manufacturing materials for its products, the fact remains that the most efficacious materials are not yet either recyclable or renewable. Likewise, Woodex recognizes that the materials used in many process industries may be non-renewable, and often hazardous, as well.

Rather than waiting for more environmentally-friendly materials to become available, Woodex concentrates instead on conserving and containing existing materials, in hope of allowing existing technology to continue ad hoc until a better technology emerges.

This is, granted, a small contribution toward sustainable communities, but Woodex believes that any contribution is better than no contribution at all.

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