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Subterranean facility earns Innovator of the Year Award

A 2009 brochure from corrugated converter Vanguard Packaging begins, “We live green.”

Pw 3242 Vanguard 1

Vanguard owner and CEO Mark Mathes says that the company is guided by “The power of small”—a phrase he coined and Walmart adopted. “What it means is that the small things that we do, when spread out over the scale of Walmart, or over the scale of the corrugated industry, or over the scale of manufacturing in general in the U.S., become massively significant,” he says. “So what we are trying to do is live every day as an example of how lots of small things start to add up.”

The new plant is part of a 34 million-sq-ft industrial park that was created from the caves that remained after miles of limestone bluffs were mined. The park is entered from the side of the exposed bluffs, with approximately 150 feet of limestone overhead. Vanguard’s new facility was created in an undeveloped area of Subtropolis and was the first in the park designed for manufacturing operations—a challenge that Vanguard met by hiring its own engineer who specialized in underground manufacturing. Among the “small things” incorporated into the design of the new plant that have led to big sustainability impacts, as well as significant cost savings, are the following:

• The plant’s 148-ft-thick ceiling provides geothermal insulation that keeps the environment at an average temperature between 75°F and 77°F. Mathes estimates that above ground, the manufacturing and fulfillment operations “would easily cost $50,000 to $60,000 a month to heat in the winter.”

• Because the majority of the facility is constructed of naturally occurring limestone, Vanguard estimates that the plant required between 200% and 300% less building materials to construct than an above ground facility.

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