Imperial Sign Corporation Benefits the Environment While Lowering Costs

Imperial Sign Corporation’s leadership has always been motivated to identify and understand all the possible opportunities to advance sustainability within their company. As a manufacturer that provides custom signage and lighting solutions, the company's impact on its clients, colleagues, community, and the environment is a high priority.

"The impacts we have through our operations, are critically important to us,” said Tom Corner, Managing Director of Imperial Sign Corporation. “Ensuring that our operations are as sustainable as possible is just one more way for us to try to be the best company we can be."

However, like many other companies, a large barrier is having the desire to reduce environmental impact without knowing how to do so in a cost-effective manner.

The latest BMO Climate Institute Business Leaders Survey showed that cost continues to be the most frequently cited barrier to implementing a climate strategy.

After hearing about the cost savings other companies achieved while cutting down their carbon footprint, Imperial was eager to learn how it could adapt their procedures. That led the company to learn about BMO’s Climate Smart Program, and how the program’s process enables customers to identify key contributions to their carbon footprint.

Starting in 2019, Climate Smart empowered Imperial to begin facilitating meaningful change in a manner that supported the environment and the company’s bottom line.

After using Climate Smart, Imperial’s key results included:

23% reduction in carbon footprint 47% reduction in carbon intensity 50% reduction in staff commuting

19% reduction in transporting people 35% reduction in paper consumption 31% reduction in waste.

Climate Smart provided Imperial with easily achievable short-term goals, like fleet electrification, and medium-term objectives, such as additional facility upgrades, to help further reduce its carbon footprint.

Emissions from waste have been reduced by nearly a third because of waste diversion strategies, including the extensive use of dedicated, touchless sorting bins.

Electrification of Imperial’s light-duty vehicle fleet enabled the company to cut road-travel emissions by nearly a fifth.

The company reduced paper consumption by 35 percent, and Imperial increased the use of paper with recycled content.

Although addressing its footprint took time and commitment, Imperial found that the process was made easier with Climate Smart’s assistance.

As part of its climate strategy, the actions that Imperial took included:

Adopting an all-EV light-duty fleet Replacing fluorescent lamps with efficient LED lighting Installing programmable thermostats

Upgrading HVAC system Upgrading weatherstripping Replacing paper used for internal meetings and activities with electronic devices Investing in upgrades of all waste receptacles, changing many of them to touchless motion sensors allowing for cleaner and easier use, and therefore making the practice easier.

Imperial has always sought to dispose of old sign components responsibly. Acrylic, Sintra, Lexan, metal and even old electrical components can be recycled. After meeting a waste mitigation consultant, Recycling Alternative, in their Climate Smart cohort, Imperial learned about other ways to divert waste from landfills while making it easy for employees to work with a new system.

Touchless bins with sensors and effective labels produced by Imperial’s design team made minimizing waste easier than ever. A Recycling Alternative team member from Climate Smart even toured Imperial’s facility to advise on what could be improved in the future and was pleased to let Imperial know that they were operating at an A+ level.

Headquartered in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, in Canada, Imperial’s projects are spread out geographically. Therefore, the company’s choice of vehicles has a big impact on the bottom line.

By using Climate Smart, Imperial was able to run the numbers on switching their three project management vehicles from internal combustion engines to EVs on a total cost of ownership (TCO) basis.

The company’s management was pleasantly surprised to see that EVs were by far the better choice over a medium to long-term horizon, with gas savings more than offsetting the higher vehicle cost for the distance driven. Four years into having an EV fleet, Imperial has no regrets about switching from gas to electric.

Imperial also replaced paper for internal meetings and activities with electronic devices, including tablets, whiteboards, and a projector. And the company set computer defaults to double-sided printing and purchased paper with recycled content.

Imperial continues to plan for a more sustainable future.

Among upcoming actions, the company is planning on converting garage doors to insulated walls with windows to maintain natural light while reducing heat loss.

The company will also be upgrading its buildings for better insulation and installing energy-efficient windows. By switching to an electric heat pump, Imperial will make its facility virtually fossil-fuel free in terms of scope 1 and 2 emissions.

BMO’s ambition is to be its clients’ lead partner in the transition to a net-zero world. We are proud to count Imperial as one of our partners.