Titan Florida has garnered the coveted ISO 50001 certification for its Pennsuco (PNS) plant –the second certification for Titan America’s two U.S. plants. PNS is the largest cement facility in Florida and recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly and efficient plants in the U.S. The two ISO 50001 certified Titan plants are the only ones in America to have reached the signature achievement for a cement plant.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, ISO 50001 is an Energy Management System standard established as a voluntary program of best practices in continuous energy improvement. ISO 50001 provides a framework of requirements for plants and other organizations to:

Develop a policy for more efficient use of energy;

Fix targets and objectives to meet the policy;

Make data-based decisions about energy use;

Measure the results;

Review how well the policy works;

Continually improve energy management.

ISO develops the standard but is not involved in the certification, which is performed by independent, external certification bodies. The core ISO 50001 team, led by George Pantazopoulos, Senior Vice President of Cement Operations and Corporate Engineering, Zaklina Stamboliska, Vice President of Cement Manufacturing, and Chris Bayne, Corporate Energy Manager, engaged the expertise of Joseph Ghislain, EPI ISO 50001 Lead Auditor and 50001 Certified Practitioner in Energy Management Systems.

“The ISO certification puts further emphasis on the importance of management commitment, integration into business processes and continuous improvement,” says Ghislain. “I have watched Titan’s Chris Bayne and the PNS team not only build an ISO 50001 system that accomplishes this but the management commitment from George and Zaklina is so strong and the integration into the business so seamless that I often had to remind them that what they were doing on a day-to-day basis was also energy management. It is just amazing.”

Titan America developed and implemented the energy management system to document the company’s best practices, better satisfy the requirements and expectations of its stakeholders and improve the overall management of the company.

“Titan is gratified by this third-party recognition of our commitment to sustainable energy management practices,” says Pantazopoulos. “In addition to our alignment with the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), TITAN has set its own sustainability targets, covering key environmental and social issues to the SDGs that are most relevant to our business.”

Titan and PNS drew from their award-winning performance in the U.S. EPA’s ENERGY STAR® program. The Roanoke Cement Company (RCC) and PNS plants have been awarded the ENERGY STAR certification repeatedly -- RCC for the 14th straight year and PNS for 13 years. The ENERGY STAR industrial program provides industry-specific energy benchmarking tools for participants.

Both plants began working toward ISO 50001 certification at about the same time, but rather than simultaneous implementation, the ISO 50001 launch was staggered to provide each plant individualized attention. Pantazopoulos, and the rest of the PNS ISO 50001 team, including Bayne, worked diligently over the course of the next 18 months, to meet the July 2020 target date.

“PNS’s energy management system owes its long-term success to the continued commitment of our leadership – who embraced it from the get-go – empowering energy management at every level,” says Bayne. According to Bayne, 75% of what was required for ISO 50001 certification was already being done by Titan at PNS.