Product Sustainability and Responsible Sourcing
Product Sustainability
As an American solar manufacturing pioneer, Array has facilitated sustainability through its use of a traceable American supply chain and low-carbon American steel. Sustainability is embedded into each phase of our product lifecycle, from our partnerships with suppliers to our manufacturing practices. Array’s product lifecycle includes four distinct phases:
Supply Chain Management and Responsible Sourcing
We follow a thorough supplier vetting process that helps ensure compliance with all applicable laws. This process leads suppliers through several stages to evaluate their approach to capacity, strategic sourcing, supplier selection, procurement, inventory, engineering, and capability. Each step provides an opportunity for incremental reviews. This process is designed to address critical issues in supply chain management and reflects our risk-based approach to ensuring that our suppliers comply with our quality, environmental and social standards. Our environmental standards include evaluating environmental performances of their activities, ensuring efficient use of water and energy, and working to reduce hazardous waste and emissions. Our social standards include respecting human rights and providing a safe, secure, and healthy workspace for all employees. To increase supplier transparency, our supplier quality engineers conduct regular supplier audits to ensure that suppliers are adhering to the Supplier Quality Manual, which includes ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001 standards. Furthermore, we are continually working to expand the recycled content of our products to ensure that we are sourcing responsibly and improving the environmental profile of our systems. Through strategic partnerships with suppliers like Nucor, we are working to increase the supply of green steel used in our trackers, which not only lowers the embedded energy, carbon, and water impacts of our sourcing, but also improves the recyclability of our products at the end of life.
Product Safety and Quality
We have established programs for Manufacturing Engineering and Packaging Engineering to drive product quality outcome improvements. We are underway with a layout transformation of our Albuquerque facility that includes the purchase of new, more energy efficient saws for production and major refurbishment of existing equipment to improve process control of our production processes. We planned a Lean transformation of our manufacturing operations to reduce waste and streamline our work processes. We have engaged all our employees in training programs with expert consultants to drive cultural transformation. Lean projects will drive improvements in safety by reducing strain and improvement ergonomics of the production processes. Quality Array maintained its status as an ISO 9001:2015 certified organization passing its external audit without any non-conformities. Our Quality Management System includes design, supply, manufacture, and commission of Array solar tracker systems. Key processes with our Quality Management System include:
- Vendor Approval Process: Utilize robust auditing practices to qualify potential suppliers and ensure existing suppliers maintain our quality standards.
- Production Part Approval Process: Verify each supplier has effective and sustainable manufacturing practices for each part they produce for Array.
- Corrective Action Process: Capture issues to investigate root causes to prevent occurrence and recurrence in similar situations.
Our quality objectives focus on risk reduction, opportunity enhancement and ensuring effective process control to prevent defects. In addition to maintaining our status as an ISO 9001 certified organization, we invested in product safety and quality by establishing the Array Tech Research Center and hiring a Manufacturing Engineer and a Packaging Engineer. We are also members of the Asociación Técnica Española de Galvanización (ATEG).
The Array Tech Research Center
We established the Array Tech Research Center in 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona, to accelerate tracker innovation, strengthen customer collaboration and create a space dedicated to researching, developing, and field testing advanced solar tracker technology. This allows us to constantly improve our products and create solar trackers that are highly durable with a fully passive, failure-free wind-load mitigation system that do not rely on sensors or electricity.
ATEG Membership
To further ensure that our trackers can endure extreme weather events, and to prevent the metal components of our solar trackers from functionally deteriorating over time through corrosion, we are members of ATEG – Asociación Técnica Española de Galvanización. This organization, based in Spain, promotes technical research and the improvement of the environmental management of the anti-corrosion treatment process, which allows us to provide the highest confidence of quality.