Alta garners major recognition for work in sustainability

NAPLES — Long known as the standard bearer in the timber industry, Alta Forest Products is garnering big-time attention for its progressive work in sustainability and energy efficiency. Alta’s Naples mill was recently named a recipient of the 2020 Idaho Awards for Leadership in Energy Efficiency.

As the world’s technology evolves on a daily basis, it would be understandable for an industry nearly as old as humanity to lag behind other industries. That’s not the Alta way, though. Alta is constantly looking for new and innovative ways to improve its efficiency in all areas, from the direct cutting to lighting. Because, if it doesn’t, it won’t be around much longer.

“The mills that will continue to survive will be forward thinking,” said Ryan Comer, Operating Manager at Alta’s Naples mill. “The ones that aren’t, you’ll see go away; they’ll become vacant parking lots.”

Already the largest producers of fencing in the world, Alta has garnered new recognition for its significant improvements in milling and lighting efficiency. In order to maintain milling proficiency while operating at a more sustainable and efficient level, Alta has installed new cutting blades that allow it to run at different speeds that are required for certain cuts rather than going at one speed all the time and wasting energy.

“We milled up our wood using horizontal resaws,” Comer said. “And in an effort to do it more efficiently instead of running at a full power, we installed variable frequency drives on all of the saw armored motors. And then we’re able to dial the speed up and down so instead of running at full RPM, we can adjust that and get the best quality cut all the while saving energy.”

Increasing efficiency while cutting is a serious necessity for a business that revolves around milling, but so is basic lighting efficiency. In a mill with outdoor lights and 24/7 indoor lighting, making sure that all forms of lighting are both energy and cost efficiency is of the utmost importance.

When fluorescent lights became the newest improvement in lighting in the late aughts, Alta adapted with the times, going all fluorescent by 2011. Now, as LED lights are the newest energy-efficient lighting, Alta is continuing to adapt, undertaking a project to install all LED lights in all of its buildings.

“it took LEDs a long time to come up to speed where they’d work in a manufacturing facility,” Comer said. “You could stick a lightbulb in your house and it would work fine, but what we use, they didn’t have the color rendering, they didn’t have the output in the light that we needed and so that has been catching up rapidly so now we are in the process of changing the plan over from fluorescents into LEDs.”

These changes Alta is making aren’t just small changes for the sake of change, though. They’re making a huge impact to the tune of saving four million kilowatt hours — enough to power 385 area homes for a year. Alta is increasing its own efficiency while becoming significantly more environmentally friendly in a world where everything we know about the environment is constantly changing.

“We want to run our mill as efficiently as we can,” Comer said. “So when installing all this new technology that allows us to increase our quality, our efficiency in saving energy is one of the best ways to do that ... we want to continue to do that as new technology becomes available.”

Even as Alta undergoes extensive equipment changes and new protocols, the company isn’t missing a beat with its safety requirements. For as much effort as it puts into increasing machine and lighting efficiency, Alta puts an equal amount of energy into maintaining its best-in-class safety measures.

“As far as safety goes, we’re at the top of the industry,” said Jeremy Dineen, Safety Manager at the Naples mill. “We probably had around three recordable injuries in the last, maybe around 1,000 or 1,200 days. I did some research a few years ago, and a person is less likely to get hurt coming to work here, even though the environment is extremely high risk, than they are if they go to work at Taco Bell or some other fast food restaurant.”

Alta’s lack of injuries isn’t just coincidence or blind luck, though. A local business that employs local people, Alta looks at its employees as a fundamental part of the company, not simply a small cog in a larger machine. That level of faith and trust motivates the company to always keep its employees’ safety at a top priority.

“That’s because of an extensive safety program,” Dineen said. “We are constantly looking at safety. We’re talking low levels of injuries and very infrequently. That’s something that we work on very hard. We try very hard to keep our people safe.”

It’s no coincidence that as northern Idaho sawmills have closed down everywhere over the last couple of decades, Alta hasn’t missed a beat. It has been around since 1940, over 80 years, and if Ryan Comer, Jeremy Dineen and the rest of the Alta team have anything to say about it, it’ll be around for another 80 and beyond.

And there is no better way to stick around than increasing efficiency and sustainability — the Alta way.