How Delta Created Thailand’s First LEED Green Retrofitted Building Part 2: Environment Management and Conservation

Bangkok, Thailand, October 30, 2019- Turning a creaking old building into a thriving sustainable hub is a team effort requiring a holistic approach to energy management and a long-term commitment to creating a better environment. At Delta Electronics Thailand, we’re fortunate to have fantastic teammates who are our most valuable resource and the inspiration for our continuing green transformation journey.

In our previous article, we summarized how Delta Thailand leveraged design features and renewable energy solutions in a year-long project to retrofit the Thailand headquarters as the first factory in Thailand with the LEED certification in the EBOM (Existing Buildings: Operations and Maintenance) category.

Thailand Energy Award

This month, Delta won the Thailand Energy Award 2019 for the 4th consecutive year in three categories: Creative Energy, Energy Conservation: Green Building and Designated Factory. As we add this latest accolade to our growing list of green building recognitions, we’ll show you how everyone’s wholehearted participation in resource management and environmental conservation helped us become a model of sustainability in Thailand.

 

Water Resources Management

water treatment

Water is a precious natural resource and a basic necessity of life. At the Delta Thailand headquarters, our rainwater harvesting system provides water used 100% internally to reduce overall water consumption. A 75 M3 capacity underground water tank stores rainwater for processing in our water treatment and recycling system.

We also treat wastewater from our buildings and store it in the storage tanks. The filtered and sanitized water is available for daily building operations including the HVAC cooling towers and watering plants. External agencies come every month to monitor our water quality in 27 parameters and four in-house environmental teams do daily monitoring.

In addition, we installed high-efficiency sanitary equipment in the restrooms including automatic toilet flush valves, automatic faucets and water-free urinals. There are 16 water meters that improve our monitoring accuracy and detect leakage in various locations including restrooms, canteen, cooling systems, gardens and wastewater treatment systems.

 

Waste Reduction and Management

Waste management at Delta covers production, operational and personal waste disposal. Using 2015 a base year, Delta set a companywide plan to reduce 15% of its overall waste by 2020. To help everyone do their part, we implemented a strict documentation submission process for employees to follow. Every working team should reduce waste and sell scrap or unused materials to boost material usage efficiency.

To show we mean business about our waste reduction goals, we avoid single-use plastics such as food packaging and beverage bottles. And since 2017, we discontinued all sales of plastic bottled water and instead offer free drinking water from dispensers set up throughout the company facilities.

Every day we embrace the 3R (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle) principle as a way of life. In the office and on the shop floor, people reuse paper documents, water bottles, cardboard boxes or separate batteries and other materials for processing. Many of our props, equipment posters, graphics and signage for in-house events are reusable.

 

Air Quality Improvement

Air Quality

Maintaining good air quality inside our offices and factory ensures a comfortable and healthy work space. Delta reduces air pollutant sources indoors by choosing low-emitting “Green Seal” or “VOC-free” construction materials and paint, implementing a smoking-free policy and placing doormats at entrances to prevent dust from entering the building. We also improved the efficiency of our mechanical ventilation systems and HVAC system outdoor air intakes to provide 10 CFM of fresh air per person.

Outside the building, Delta’s shuttle service helps ease traffic congestion and overcrowding at parking lots and reduces greenhouse gas emissions from private cars. Company-provided vehicles pick-up and drop-off employees along 11 routes. Over 85% of our employees commute with the company shuttle service which employs a large fleet of buses and vans daily for each shift.

 

Building Environment Management

Energy Management System

Delta’s Energy Management Team uses our original SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) System to track and optimize energy use in our headquarters. This software offers a simplified monitoring platform of the entire building’s energy consumption.

Managers use the single platform to track, collect, evaluate and get real-time display on a single device called the Delta Power Meter. Armed with up to 56 Delta Intelligent Monitoring and Management Systems, the Delta Energy Management Team can optimize energy saving and management effectively during routine operations.

 

Continuous Improvement for Greener Buildings

Building Improvement

In 2011, Delta became the first company in Thailand to achieve the ISO50001 Energy Management Standard Certification and ISO14064-1 Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Removals Quantification and Reporting.

By strictly following our Safety, Occupational Health and Working Environment Policy and company management programs, we reduce the impact of pollution on the surrounding environment. Our in-house maintenance and management teams conduct continuous control of the effects of pollution and bring in external agencies to audit our work environment every year.

 

A Sustainable Future for Thailand

With our mission for energy-efficient innovation spurring us to take greater strides in our sustainability journey, we find unity in our passion to care of the environment and communities as we deliver on the Delta brand promise: Smarter. Greener. Together.

We hope this two-part series on the Delta Thailand green headquarters shows you it’s never too late to go green in your building management and workplace lifestyle. And we believe visionaries like you will take up the challenge and join us in creating more green buildings nationwide for a more prosperous, healthy and happy Thailand!

 


05 November 2019