A Lot of Air at Nissan

This tubing doesn’t look like much:

But it really represents just a few feet of the miles of tubing that the Nissan Energy Management Team inspected as they started checking out the compressed air tubing that is used at its manufacturing plants in Smyrna and Decherd, Tennessee, and Canton, Mississippi.

The team was checking for leaks. And they found leaks. In fact, the Nissan Energy Management Team calculated that more than 20% of the compressed air used in the factories was being wasted.

So they plugged the leaks.

As a result, they’ve determined that they saved 11,300 megawatt hours of energy in 2013.

Said John Martin, Nissan senior vice president, Manufacturing, Supply Chain Management and Purchasing: “We saved enough energy to power more than 700 homes for a year, offset the greenhouse gas emissions of nearly 2,800 tons of landfill waste or better yet, to drive the all-electric Nissan LEAF around the earth more than 40,000.”

That tubing looks a little different now, doesn’t it?