“Partnership with a vision brought about the largest “Steel Winds” energy project on the Great Lakes,” says Keith Nagel, director of environmental affairs and real estate for ArcelorMittal USA.
This partnership was born when ArcelorMittal USA’s predecessor company, Mittal Steel USA, assumed liabilities of a massive 1,200-acre Brownfield site during the acquisition of a major integrated steel facility in Lackawanna, N.Y. The blazing wind speeds at the site encouraged Keith to install a meteorological tower in order to record wind patterns. A local university was recruited to understand and evaluate the data. The results confirmed the latent potential the site held for windmill energy generation. With a vivid plan to establish beneficial reuse of this massive Brownfield site ArcelorMittal partnered with BQ Energy, UPC Wind Management LLC and Clipper Windpower, Inc. to start in the Fall of 2006, ‘Steel Winds’- one of the nation’s largest urban wind farms.
The project had a “slag breaking” ceremony on September 15, 2006. The first of eight 400-foot state-of-the-art wind mills was put into place in December 2006. The wind farm resides on 160 (of the total 1,200) acres along the eastern shore of Lake Erie proudly visible from the major highway that runs along Lake Erie and through the city of Lackawanna, New York.
Novelis Inc. has found the perfect convergence of its business objectives with environmental sustainability in the avatar of ‘recycling’. The organization has given novel hues to this term by creating partnerships to procure used aluminum cans that form a principal raw material for its product. In addition to the huge cost savings for the company this strategy has also contributed to saving the environment by decreasing the carbon dioxide off-gassing and the consumption of electricity involved in manufacturing aluminum.
The Winter 2004 Issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review tells the story of Placer Dome's development of "The Care Project" to facilitate the lay off of more than 13,000 employees in seven countries in a fair and responsible manner. A Canada-based global mining firm, Placer Dome purchased 50 percent of the South Deep Mine from Western Areas Limited in 1999. The mine required massive restructuring in order to make it profitable and to bring it in line with Placer Dome’s safety standards, resulting in nearly a third of the mine’s workforce being let go.
