Majo Thurman: Minding Rockwell’s Environmental Sustainability
Majo Thurman in 2020.
Meet Majo. She’s director of environment, health & safety for Rockwell Automation, a global corporation headquartered right in Milwaukee. She started as an environmental engineer for the Milwaukee location in 1990, and she has served as director for over 15 years. Majo and her team are focused on providing a safe place to work for Rockwell’s thousands of employees and maintaining compliance with occupational safety and environmental rules and regulations. Increasingly this has included practices related to environmental sustainability. You may not know it from walking along the street beneath the historic Allen-Bradley clocktower, but in 2010 Rockwell installed a green roof on top of the eighth floor of the building to the west of S. 2nd Street. Supported by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) and motivated by doing their part to improve Milwaukee’s water quality, Rockwell’s green roof slows and absorbs stormwater that can otherwise contribute to sewer overflows during heavy rains that threaten to overwhelm the system. At 49,000 square feet and designed to capture a million gallons of stormwater per year, Majo says this symbol of sustainability is the largest single-level green roof in the state of Wisconsin.
Twenty-four varieties of sedum were planted to start Rockwell Automation’s 49,000-square-foot green roof in 2010.
Rockwell Automation is also demonstrating leadership on environmental sustainability issues that ultimately benefit our relationship with water—including joining the fight against global climate change. In November 2020, the company announced its goal for carbon-neutral global operations by 2030. This means Rockwell would limit its direct carbon emissions and pay to offset remaining carbon emissions. Ahead of that goal, in 2015 Rockwell installed a 257-kilowatt solar array on its Mequon facility capable of powering 20% of that building. Majo says Rockwell will investigate retrofitting its fleet of vehicles to make progress toward the carbon-neutral goal. According to its 2019 corporate responsibility report, Rockwell’s global operations consume 815,000 gigajoules of electricity in a year. Offsetting that figure would equate with powering down the coal-fired Oak Creek Power Plant for about eight days. It’s a drop in the bucket, but still a significant commitment by a large company on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index with leverage to influence peers and improve the practices of its customers across the globe.