Subject Areas: Lighting, Water, Waste, Insulation, Pollution Prevention
Sector: Transport
Background
The Ferrybank Garage of Bus Eireann maintains a fleet of ninety locally based buses, and supports a further forty which terminate their routes at Waterford City. In addition to mechanical maintenance and repairs, this includes daily washing and cleaning of each vehicle.
Garage manager Eddie Hannon (seen with his team above) is behind an extensive and ongoing programme to reduce energy, water and waste costs throughout the facility and hence improve environmental performance.
Lighting
The main lights in the garage were near the end of their practical life, and instead of just replacing them like-for-like, we took some time to investigate our options. In the end we decided to go for long-life Induction High Bay lighting fixtures. These cost €12,000 to install, but give an annual saving on our electricity bill of €7,600. So they will pay for themselves in under two years.
As a further refinement we are fitting a motion detector and light sensor to each unit, so that it will only light when it is actually needed. This will give further savings. Our choice of induction lighting made this possible, as other types of high bay lighting are unsuitable for this type of lighting control due to their ‘warm-up’ time.
We also replaced our old inspection lamps with 24V rechargeable LED lamps. The old lamps were on mains leads, prone to damage and a potential safely hazard. We were spending €2,500 per year on replacement lamps and cables. The new lamps cost a total of only €840, are handier to use, more energy-efficient, and not prone to damage.
We then replaced our yard lights with energy efficient alternatives, to complete the package.
Water
As part of our EcoCert certification we needed to look at our water usage and carry out a leak test. To cut a long story short, we found a variety of leaks spread over the site, and repairing these saved us €8,500 per year in water charges.
We are about to fit flush controls to the urinals in both gent’s toilets. This is anticipated to yield a further €3,000 a year in water savings.
The bus wash is a major user of water, and we are now planning to filter and re-use the water for this. We are also seriously looking at rainwater harvesting to further reduce the cost of operating the bus wash.
Waste Disposal
We have taken measures to improve the level of recycling at the garage, and to avoid hazardous waste, such as oily rags, going to landfill.
Insulation & Heating
The main garage building required extensive renovation, and we took the opportunity to re-roof it with insulated panelling, and likewise the old metal wall panels. The roller-shutter doors have been replaced which makes the whole area much more comfortable to work in, and easier to heat.
Pollution Prevention
As part of our environmental improvements we looked at pollution prevention. Being an old site, there was great scope to reduce our pollution risks. Our biggest investment will be to install a new underground drainage system, with separators to catch any spilled oil. We have already created a new bunded store and put bunds under all our oil and chemicals storage drums.
