Torry Hoover
Hoover & Strong, North Chesterfield, Virginia
Torry Hoover, president of Hoover & Strong Inc. in North Chesterfield, Virginia, admits that he can’t take credit for his company’s dedication to being green. “Our roots started in refining and recycling,” he explains. “It’s always been a part of our fabric. It was a strong part of the company, even before me, but I think my vision has helped pull our efforts together.”
In addition to offering its customers 100 percent recycled metals and Fairmined gold, the company has also looked at how it can improve its own operations to be more green and sustainable. As a refiner, the company’s furnaces need to run hot. About 15 years ago the company made the decision to use recycled water in order to cool down and control the temperature of the furnaces.
“We installed four large water recyclers that cool the water and recirculate it,” Hoover explains. “To prevent the furnaces from getting too hot, we just run water through them to get them to operate at a specific temperature. It’s a closed system versus an open system where you have to continue bringing water in to control the temperature.”
He estimates that a system like this has a payback period of at least 10 years, but adds that people shouldn’t focus on that. “If you look at it as a typical payback, you couldn’t justify the cost,” he says. “You could say that it’s just as easy to use city water, cool the equipment, and then dump it back into the sewer. That’s not environmentally friendly.”
Around the same time that the company installed the water recyclers, it also converted from a traditional acid system for refining metals to a chlorine-based system. “One of our goals was to reduce our use of chemicals so that we didn’t have to deal with them down the chain,” he says. This conversion helped the company to reduce its chemical consumption by 80 percent. “We have an air-scrubbing system that neutralizes any acid so the air is clean going out. This system also makes it easier to deal with our wastewater. Then we can just evaporate it, and no water leaves the facility.”
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