| ISO 9000 |
| Internal Auditing |
| SPC |
| Integrated Management Systems |
| Six Sigma |
| Root Cause Analysis/Problem Solving |
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Increasingly, customers have come to understand that the environmental benefits of a product don't begin or end with a purchase. Most environmental impacts and energy use occur during raw material production and product processing or in waste disposal. With a never-ending liability, manufacturers are rightly concerned with the ultimate fate of the products they produce. The science of life cycle analysis has developed over the past decades, sometimes through trial and error. There has been little agreement even among scientists over what constituted a complete life cycle. Starting from scratch to develop complete data could require years of effort and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Progress has been made, however, and consensus is being reached on what value life cycle assessments really bring. Some standard models have been developed including the Building Environmental and Economic Sustainability (BEES) program developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and underwritten by the EPA Office of Environmentally Preferable Procurement. Large databases of environmental data have been collected to remove much of the burden of data gathering. Omni Tech can access much of this existing data and was the first consulting firm to submit data for BEES assessment. We believe the proper role of life cycle assessment is to make choices, so our philosophy for life cycle assessment is to streamline the process by circumscribing only the necessary variables for product comparison. By looking at a limited set of data pertaining to differences between products or processes, we can facilitate decision-making based on relative differences without having to develop absolute values that serve no real role in the process. This allows Omni Tech to reduce the cost in two ways: first assess what data is already accessible without reinventing the wheel and second look specifically at what is necessary to know to make a decision. Years of effort can be cut to months and significant savings can result. Omni Tech can also show a client how to put life cycle assessment to work in the marketplace to win more customers, especially in government procurement. With waste disposal costs rising and options being reduced by new regulations, the economics of what to do with wastes are changing rapidly. This is true for agricultural processors and chemical companies alike. Omni Tech looks at waste streams as an economic challenge. Can waste materials, especially biobased materials from agricultural or forest products processing be converted to new value-added products? Can waste energy or process inputs be recycled and reused to reduce total disposal costs enough to afford new systems? What means of disposal are most economical and can processes be altered with new materials to lower total disposal costs? Are wastes being unfairly classified as hazardous? Omni Tech has helped clients to look freshly at total waste material production to identify areas where disposal costs can be reduced. Out knowledge of chemical markets has allowed us to look at wastes from food processing and recognize the higher value of waste streams for industrial chemical use and to develop research programs to develop processes to use that waste in value-added applications.
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