3M: Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement Award Winner

In the past year, 3M’s manufacturing plant in Columbia made three key changes that caught the city’s attention: they switched to LED lights in their manufacturing space, added solar panels to the top of their roofs, and replaced their old boilers with new, energy-efficient ones.

In total, the new lights and solar power saved over 34,000 kilowatt hours of energy per year. The boilers brought their energy efficiency up, from 56 percent to 87 percent. 3M even used one of its own products, a barrier film that goes on top of solar panels, to make the changes.

These three changes aren’t 3M’s only foray into sustainability — in fact, the whole company is founded on sustainability. The company tagline is “3M Science. Applied to Life.”

“3M is a company that is rooted in scientific exploration and on the belief that every problem has a solution,” says Plant Manager Dale Tideman. “We believe strongly that science is just science until you use it to improve the world.”

Since 1975, the international corporation has prevented 4.1 billion pounds of air, water, and waste pollution through its 3-P initiative called Pollution Prevention Pays. The program focuses on making changes to reduce energy and water use as well as raw material waste. The goal at Columbia’s plant is to send zero pounds of waste to landfills by reusing and recycling metals and plastics used in manufacturing.

“Not only are we reducing our own waste, but we are coming up with solutions for our customers,” Tideman says. Many 3M products help customers be more energy efficient, like a window film that lets in light, but not heat, allowing a building to reduce air conditioning use.

“We believe in improving every life … we just think it’s the right thing to do,” Tideman says. “We’ve only got one planet, we need to take care of it, and we all have the responsibility to do our part.”