Keystone’s green poultry further processing plant wins award

Keystone Foods LLC’s total commitment to sustaining the planet through local community stewardship is a key tenet behind its winning of the 2017 Clean Water Award for wastewater pretreatment.

Carla Prince, a safety manager with Keystone Foods, left, Matt Jolliff, a plant manager with Keystone Foods, center, and Steve Smith, O’Brien and Gere's on-site operations supervisor, play pivotal roles in Keystone's Gasden facility. Photo by John Pierson.
Carla Prince, a safety manager with Keystone Foods, left, Matt Jolliff, a plant manager with Keystone Foods, center, and Steve Smith, O’Brien and Gere's on-site operations supervisor, play pivotal roles in Keystone's Gasden facility. Photo by John Pierson.

Keystone Foods LLC’s total commitment to sustaining the planet through local community stewardship is a key tenet behind its winning of the 2017 Clean Water Award for wastewater pretreatment.

Keystone aims to exceed its customers’ expectations by producing some of the world’s finest consumer brands. Through its KEYSTAR program, Keystone further aligns business processes with socially responsible value for its customers.

Plant details

The Gadsden, Alabama, poultry further processing facility exemplifies how the company operates sustainably. Everywhere, from poultry further processing to its wastewater pre-treatment plant, the facility embraces state-of-the-art software and programmable logic controllers to combine teamwork and technology.

The 200,000-square-foot plant contains a 65,000-square-foot processing area equipped with three fully-independent lines capable of producing 16,000 pounds of product per hour. Two of the processing lines produce cooked poultry, finished goods as diced, stripped, shredded, sliced or formed products. The third line can run almost all products as well as wings and breaded par-fry products. An adjacent 100,000-square-foot storage facility is dedicated to Gadsden and other Keystone facilities.

The work-in-progress is managed on all three lines using a manufacturing execution system (MES), which tracks all items, formulas, allergens and settings so that when products are scheduled, all associated equipment is configured appropriately. The system also allows for traceability and consistency by mitigating variability.

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Steve Smith, O'Brien & Gere's on-site operations supervisor, examines the status of the dissolved air flotation polymer pumps inside Keystone Foods' Gadsden, Alabama, facility. | Photo by John Pierson.

Wastewater treatment

Wastewater pre-treatment management is also accomplished using an interactive, electronic process control and data management system. The software also enables tracking of both operations and maintenance services and regularly scheduled activities. Both automated and manually entered data can be quickly communicated, analyzed and reported.

“The MES holds data, so if we were to ever have the best run ever or the worst run ever, we can investigate to see out of all the things we have set, what was different or not quite right,” Matt Jolliff, Keystone’s plant manager said. “We also have very competent people maintaining the hardware and software. The MES is not proprietary but the set-up is customized for us.”

Losses to wastewater can be estimated from yield calculations.

The wastewater management software is provided and managed by O’Brien & Gere (OBG), a New York-based engineering firm. OBG also operates and maintains the wastewater pre-treatment system through both on-site operators and off-site monitoring. OBG is also responsible for the confidentiality, integrity and availability of all documents, although Keystone owns the system.

“We run a variety of samples every day and enter those, but the process readings are grabbed by the software,” Steve Smith, OBG’s on-site operations supervisor, said.

The pre-treatment system handles an average flow of 350,000 gallons per day, with the majority of the wastewater volume coming from third shift sanitation. Primary solids removal is accomplished using a rotary drum screen. An equalization basin can balance the average flow over a day and a half. A dissolved air flotation (DAF) unit with chemicals subsequently removes oil and grease.

A secondary biological process is used to lower the five-day total biochemical oxygen demand (TBOD), total Kjeldahl nitrogen (TKN) and total phosphorus (TP). The flow is distributed between two adjacent aeration basins to remove TBOD, phosphorus and convert ammonia to nitrate. A portion of the mixed liquor suspended solids (MLSS) or bacteria wasted is returned to low dissolved oxygen or anoxic zones at the beginning of the basins so that nitrate and remaining BOD are removed. A second chemical DAF unit provides a small footprint to clarify any remaining suspended solids (TSS) from the discharged water, adding to the consistency in operational performance.

The overall process provides an impressive 99 percent removal of its permitted loadings for TBOD and ammonia-nitrogen, with oil and grease typically below detection levels. TKN is usually 90 percent below permitted limits. Only monitoring is required for TP and TSS as these remain well within concentrations the local public water reclamation plant can handle.

Waste solids from the primary DAF unit are sent to a vertical holding tank for improved dewatering. These primary solids are combined with the waste activated sludge for beneficial reuse in land application. Since opening in 2009, more than 4 million gallons of nutrient rich solids from the facility were applied by a contracted agent and more than 3 million pounds of waste meat were screened and recycled.

Energy saving throughout the process come from variable frequency drive (VFD) pumps controlling influent feed rates, aeration blower operations flexibility afforded by the dual basin setup, and axial submersible mixers efficiently transferring wastewater between aerobic and anoxic zones. Average water consumption was reduced by more than 200,000 gallons per day through improved training and refining operations such as steam for selected sanitation procedures and reusing rooftop refrigeration condensation in vacuum pumps.

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Treated effluent from the second dissolved air flotation unit that is discharged to the local water reclamation facility. | Photo by John Pierson.

Safety and social responsibility

The facility further leverages its software technologies data and its teamwork through what Keystone calls EnviroKEY, an in-house environment management system (EMS) used to identify definable and implementable continuous improvement goals. 

“Our core company values are to keep out pollution, expect 100% compliance, and say yes to improvement,” Carla Prince, a safety manager with Keystone, said.

A team comprised of representatives from each department annually evaluates environmental aspects and selects five top potential impacts.

“We share the measurable objectives and targets with our employees and contractors, and provide the tools needed to achieve the objectives,” Prince said. “We use a commercially available environmental management software solution and self, corporate and third-party audits to ensure we are on track.”

In 2016, the Gadsden facility accomplished the following impacts for the related goals:

  • Process safety management (PSM): Partnered with the Alabama Fire College and Personnel Standards Commission to improve hazmat training, received 99 percent on its corporate PSM audit and field verified all piping and instrumentation diagrams with drawings.
  • Storm Water: Installed a containment valve on a 24-inch discharge pipe, cleaned the drainage ditch to maintain storm water flow and conducted a spills risk analysis which identified a vehicle fuel spill from a semitrailer.
  • Waste to landfill: Reduced the waste to landfill by 290 tons.
  • Waste solids: Relocated a pump closer to the primary DAF unit and installed a VFD on that pump to provide a slow, continuous transport of solids.
  • Wastewater: Increased total phosphorus removal from 90 percent to 95 percent by flow management, chemical evaluation and management and increased the MLSS concentration.

Keystone’s Gadsden facility is an active community member, too. A charity golf tournament it hosts tripled its funds raised since 2014, with $15,000 donated to the Boys & Girls Club in 2017. Employees also participate in other funding raising activities for cancer awareness, heart health, an annual day of action, and the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation.

The facility also works to empower and train employees through fun activities.

“We believe in supporting our people. Annually we have a safety week with different topics every day,” Prince said. “But we have also included environmental topics such as storm water, healthy snack choices, a dunking booth fund raiser and lots of different things to encourage and empower our people.”

She added that if the facility achieves 1 million safe hours, all employees receive a steak dinner and small gifts, and a car is given away.

“I am on the EMS team. OBG knows that Keystone counts on us to be the experts and OBG is counting on me to make the system perform,” Smith said. “There’s a lot of communications between the Gadsden team about all of its technology data so that we are doing right by the community.”

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