By: Karunakaren MH, student at the Thunderbird School of Global Management
A few months ago, I traveled halfway across the world from the bright, hot tropical beaches of south-east Asia into a gloomy, chilly Chicago summer to begin my journey as an EDF Climate Corps fellow. A week before I started at Associated Materials, a thunderstorm flooded the entire ground floor of the corporate office, and the place needed to be completely restored. What a cliché! Because of how quickly they recovered, I arrived at the office knowing that its resilience to adversity and commitment to energy efficiency goals would mean I had a great summer ahead of me.
Associated Materials (AMI) is a vertically integrated company in the exterior building products industry with 11 manufacturing locations and over 120 distribution centers catering to the North American market. It spends about $15 million annually on energy utilities and, this summer, hired two EDF Climate Corp fellows to look for opportunities to reduce energy costs. I worked on the manufacturing locations and my colleague, Vinnakota Krishna, looked at the supply centers. Read More