Photo By Master Sgt. J. L. Wright Jr. | JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - Troy Linton discards a cloth containing hazardous material into...... read more read more
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Fleet Readiness Center Southeast (FRCSE) was recently recognized for environmental stewardship earning a CNO Environmental Award.
FRCSE was among two other commands in the nation selected as winners in the environmental quality, industrial installation category. Other winners included FRC Southwest in San Diego and Naval Base Kitsap in Bremerton, Washington.
FRCSE is a full-spectrum maintenance operation with all the key capabilities required to maintain high-performance aircraft. Its mission includes providing comprehensive in-service engineering and logistics services for support of assigned air vehicles, engines and weapons systems.
The command also performs complete overhaul capabilities for many Navy and Air Force aircraft components.
In performing these services, the military depot has a responsibility to serve as a good steward of the environment, according to FRCSE Commanding Officer Capt. John Kemna.
“FRCSE considers environmental stewardship to be of equal importance to productivity, quality and safety,” he said. “We demonstrate that commitment by investing in programs that minimize, and in some cases eliminate hazardous materials and pollution that negatively affect our environment.
“We are fully committed to employee environmental training to ensure compliance, reduce our pollution footprint and ensure continuous improvement.”
Environmental aspects associated with FRCSE’s mission include chemical and mechanical
depainting, surface coating, chemical cleaning and degreasing, machining, composite repair, nondestructive testing, heat-treating, and jet engine testing.
“We are regulated by state and federal regulations and must comply with their requirements with everything we do here,” said Henry Pape, environmental engineer at FRCSE. “Our goal is mission plus compliance; they both go hand-in-hand.”
During fiscal year 2014, the command was audited by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) and the city of Jacksonville’s Environmental Quality Division – both audits had no findings documented.
FRCSE also received no documented findings in an audit for International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001:2004.
ISO 14001:2004 outlines the framework an organization can follow to set up an effective environmental management system.
“When you have a certified program, like ISO 14001, you are supposed to follow all of its requirements,” said FRCSE Environmental Engineer Jacob Deeb. “This should be reflected through effective internal environmental compliance and management audits.”
These audits demonstrate the level of commitment FRCSE employees have to the environment in which they live and work, according to Pape.
“We have had an award-winning environmental program for quite a while,” he said. “We have been recognized with various awards for the past five years including a personal letter from the secretary of the FDEP.
The letter thanked FRCSE for ‘promotion of a culture of environmental stewardship and implementing a highly successful compliance management system that is delivering superior results.’
In the award nomination, FRCSE highlighted its success in four key areas: process improvements, compliance with regulations, environmental and economic performance, and recycling programs.
To ensure excellence, the command used the 4D business practice taught by the FranklinCovey Company. FranklinCovey is a global consulting and training firm specializing in strategy execution.
The 4D, or 4 disciplines of execution, requires an organization to focus on the wildly important, act on lead measures, keep a compelling scoreboard, and create a cadence of accountability.
“The command adopted an environmental wildly important goal (WIG), said Pape. “The WIG here is to develop environmental acumen across the command by applying 4D principles at the shop level.”
FRCSE used these principles to establish an environmental ‘game plan’ through training, coaching, scoring, reviewing, and correcting.
Adopting this model has allowed FRCSE to reduce its hazardous waste stream by more than 80 percent in recent years – about 900,000 pounds.
Other achievements attributed to this practice include: a recycling program diverting more than 881 tons of landfill waste, recycling more than 7-tons of universal waste, and recycling more than 280 tons of used oil for energy recovery.
“Everyone from the top down has a responsibility to our environmental program, said Troy Linton, a sheet metal mechanic at FRCSE. “I am not just responsible to the command, I am responsible to the environment itself.”
Linton routinely handles hazardous material and said proper training and communication up and down the chain of command is what allows FRCSE to have a successful environmental program.
“I think we are a benchmark for how things should be done,” added Pape.
| Date Taken: | 05.19.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 05.19.2015 13:23 |
| Story ID: | 163795 |
| Location: | NAVAL AIR STATION JACKSONVILLE, FL, US |
| Web Views: | 218 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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