By Paul Sheldon & Bailey Watts, C1 Contributors
“You should fire me right now!”
That’s what Bailey Waits, Maintenance Manager for the Shelby County Division of Corrections, Memphis, TN, told his boss in November of 2013. Waits had just returned from a tour of the Indiana Department of Correction sponsored by GreenPrisons.org.
His facility in Shelby County had been recycling, but had been baling and giving away the recyclable materials. Waits was happy with the reduction in trash hauling costs, but after observing the sustainability oriented practices at corrections facilities in Putnamville, Wabash Valley and Plainfield, Indiana he realized that many opportunities for saving money and making money were being missed.
Of course saying he should be fired was tongue-in-cheek, but Waits did let then Division Director James Coleman know that there were multiple opportunities for the corrections center to save resources and money through green projects as well as possibly bring in additional revenue.
Waits had been with the Shelby County Division of Corrections for thirty years, when he was asked to go to Indiana and look at their “green” practices. He thought, like many that had been in maintenance for many years that “this recycling stuff won’t work for us.” After touring facilities in Indiana with Kevin Orme, Executive Director of Indiana DOC’s Construction services, Waits realized that these practices did work in facilities that were as old as the Shelby County facility, which opened in 1929.
After returning from Indiana, Waits met with the Director of the Division of Corrections and the two started to implement several of the practices that Indiana had been using for the last several years, including selling recyclables rather that giving them away, installing a solar hot water system on one housing unit, and replacing fluorescent lighting with LED lighting.
In 2014 when the Memphis Sustainability Forum was held at the Shelby County Law Enforcement and Corrections Training Academy, Coleman and Waits were able to showcase their “green projects” for the attendees and show numbers for savings to the division. Waits stated that many people have been leery of solar usage, but at that time the solar water heating system was supplying 80 to 85% of the hot water used in the inmate housing unit where it was installed and reducing the gas usage for that building by 75 to 80%. The system is expected to pay for itself in 18 months.
Waits stated that he hopes at some point to no longer need a back-up water heating system for the solar heating systems and that there are currently plans to install solar water heating on 7 more buildings out of the 43 buildings at the Division of Corrections. He is also planning to install an ozone-driven sanitizing system in the compound laundry, which would eliminate the need to wash clothing and bedding in hot water.
Shelby County has been awarded a $250,000 grant, which brings total funds available for sustainability projects to $600,000. Waits is hopeful that the savings from projects funded by this money will then pay for more projects.
According to Waits he has had a total buy-in from the maintenance staff. “We have people bringing in plastic and cardboard from home rather than throwing it in their garbage cans.” Waits continued, “These guys are a bunch of old-school maintenance men that take some convincing to try something new; but they saw the numbers and the excitement in my eyes and became converts to the “green way of thinking.”
Now Shelby County Division of Corrections is dismantling old air conditioner units, inventorying any usable parts, and separating the other parts by kind of metal, then sending it for recycling. Previously the entire unit would have been put into a construction dumpster and hauled to the landfill. So far about $25,000 has been saved through this process. The Maintenance Department also has an enclosed trailer for cardboard packaging to be placed in, when supplies and parts are received. Since the money from the recycled and salvaged materials comes back to the department’s budget the employees see a reason to do it.
Waits met with the mayor of Shelby County in October to discuss the sustainability projects at the Division of Corrections. Mayor Mark Luttrell was excited by the work accomplished so far and asked if these ideas would work in the county school system, which also falls under the mayor’s umbrella, as well as other county buildings and facilities. Now the Division of Corrections will begin working with other county entities to implement sustainability and green projects county-wide.
Bailey Waits is the Maintenance Manager for Shelby County Division of Corrections, in Memphis, TN.
Paul Sheldon, M.A. is Senior Advisor with www.GreenPrisons.org, Development Consultant to the Insight Garden Program at California’s San Quentin State Prison, and a Member of the Board of Oakland, CA-based www.PlantingJustice.org.