At the ISPE’s recent 2024 Facilities of the Future conference, presentations from a number of leaders in the pharmaceutical industry emphasized how important it is for organizations to promote sustainability.
While presenters covered a variety of initiatives—from green building design to solar energy to electric vehicles and more—one topic that is particularly relevant to pharmaceutical, biotech, and laboratory markets is how to bring environmental and cold storage systems in line with sustainability efforts.
Over our decades in the industry, Environmental Specialties has developed extensive expertise in the design and engineering of energy efficient environmental storage chambers. Here, we’ll share some insights into how optimizing this equipment can help you promote facility sustainability.
Aligning Chamber Design with Sustainable Goals
Whether they be freezer rooms or a cold-storage walk-ins, the reality is that environmental chambers can consume significant amounts of energy. This equipment stores incredibly important, valuable products that require precise humidity control, exacting temperature regulation, and full redundancy. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that they account for a good portion of your utility bill.
However, that doesn’t mean that your environmental storage needs should be seen as an obstacle to your sustainability goals. In fact, with the right equipment and a contractor with the right expertise, your environmental chamber can play a central role in helping you meet even the most ambitious efficiency and sustainability goals.
Our team has determined three core requirements for achieving sustainable environmental chambers: forward-thinking construction, quality engineering, and efficient design.
Three Requirements for Sustainable Chambers
- Forward-Thinking Construction: Environmental rooms are some of the most complex parts of a facility and should be integrated into a building’s design from the earliest stages. This can help enhance efficiency, improve the integrity of your building envelope, and avoid the need for rework which is both costly and wasteful.
Further, it is also important to account for energy consumption at the onset of a project. Don’t underestimate the utilities required to operate environmental rooms and consider balancing these requirements by integrating renewable energy sources into the facility.
- Quality Engineering: Reducing waste is one of the best ways to minimize your environmental impact. When storage chambers are designed for long-term operation utilizing high-quality materials, less energy and fewer resources are expended to produce and install their replacements.
At Environmental Specialties, our commitment to exceptional engineering is evident in the longevity of our very first ultra-low walk-in chamber, which was constructed in 1999 and is still running strong today. When a chamber lasts for a quarter century, it’s good for our clients and good for the environment!
- Efficient Design: Because of the impact it can have on utility costs, chamber energy efficiency is the sustainable feature most immediately felt in day-to-day operations. However, efficient chamber design is not only about energy consumption but must also account for effective space utilization. Inefficient use of space is one of the most common flaws we see in the design of our competitor’s chambers.
In fact, compared to traditional ‘freezer farms’, our walk-in suites take up 33-percent less building space to store the same amount of product. In turn, we’ve seen clients reduce total energy use by 75-percent which can amount to many hundreds of thousands of pounds of CO2 emissions.