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Star Refrigeration delivers major energy and carbon savings at DHL Wetherspoon distribution centre

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GLASGOW, Scotland, May 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Star Refrigeration has helped J D Wetherspoon and DHL stride forward in energy efficiency and sustainability with the successful upgrade of the frozen storage refrigeration system at their Daventry distribution centre. The installation of Star’s low-charge ammonia Azanefreezer 2.0 has delivered energy savings far exceeding initial projections, cutting annual electricity use by more than 600,000kWh, reducing costs by nearly £200,000 per year, and lowering carbon emissions by 123 tonnes.

The project forms part of a long-term partnership between Star Refrigeration and DHL, who operate the 192,000 m3 J D Wetherspoon distribution hub. Faced with rising maintenance costs and an ageing refrigeration plant originally installed in 2004, DHL sought a future-proof, environmentally responsible solution capable of supporting both firms’ net zero goals. A comprehensive technical and financial analysis conducted by Star demonstrated the limitations of the existing pumped-circulation ammonia system and outlined the efficiency, safety and lifecycle benefits of upgrading to a modern, low-charge ammonia design.

The business case was compelling. Forecasts suggested that maintaining the old plant would incur approximately £400,000 in upgrade costs between 2024 and 2027, with a further £180,000 expected in running costs. By contrast, the Azanefreezer 2.0 offered a system with no water usage or associated treatment requirements, advanced intelligent controls, and a significantly lower ammonia charge of just 220kg, improving both safety and environmental performance.

The new 290kW system was designed to operate alongside an existing 120 kW Azanfreezer 1.0 installed in 2016. Working together, the units now provide a robust, energy-optimised refrigeration solution capable of supporting the facility’s 31,000m3 frozen store with exceptional reliability and efficiency. To minimise disruption to operations, Star implemented a phased decommissioning of the old plant during winter, allowing the freezer to remain fully operational throughout the installation.

Since the upgrade, the site has achieved a remarkable 17% improvement beyond the UK’s ‘Best Practice’ benchmark for cold storage facilities of a comparable size. With annual energy savings more than triple the original £5,000-per-mongh estimate, the project has delivered a payback period of under two years – far faster than projected.

Daniel Johnson, Engineering Manager at DHL, said, “We have analysed the electricity figures before and after the installation, and the results speak for themselves: the new system is saving on average around 617,000 kWh per year. This has produced substantial energy cost reductions and helped us exceed industry efficiency standards. Working with Star Refrigeration has been a very positive experience. Their team took the time to understand our operational demands and sustainability goals, and the new system now provides long-term resilience, efficiency and environmental benefits.”

The refrigeration performance and operational visibility of the site have been further strengthened by Star’s Ethos technology, and AI-driven digital optimisation system that provides real-time monitoring, performance benchmarking, and predictive analytics. Ethos enables Star’s engineering and maintenance teams to identify inefficiencies, anticipate future requirements, and support ongoing energy reductions. Remote monitoring, combined with the expertise of Star’s 30-strong Derby-based team, ensures the system continues to operate at peak performance.

The project represents an important milestone in the evolving UK cold chain landscape, where operators are facing rising pressures to reduce energy consumption, minimise carbon impact, and comply with future environmental regulations.

Aiden Perks, Regional Sales Manager (Midlands) at Star Refrigeration, said, “This project shows what is possible when businesses commit to forward-thinking engineering and data-driven decision-making. The impact at Daventry reduced energy use, lower costs, and demonstrated the value of strong partnerships that place innovation, lifecycle costs, and sustainability at their core.”

With more than 18 months of operational data confirming consistently strong performance, the Daventry facility is now considered one of the most energy-efficient cold stores in the country, offering a powerful example of how industrial refrigeration can support both commercial competitiveness and environmental responsibility.

For more information visit the DHL / J D Wetherspoon refrigeration project case study.

 

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SOURCE Star Refrigeration

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San Jose City Employees Get Strike-Ready After Several Months of Stalled Contract Negotiations with City Administration

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SAN JOSE, Calif., July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — On Wednesday, July 29, hundreds of San Jose city employees and members of IFPTE Local 21 and MEF-AFSCME Local 101 will attend Strike School to learn what it means to strike and the laws that protect their right to strike. Organization around Strike School comes after months of stalled negotiations between city workers and the City Administration. Workers have signed a strike pledge and held several informational pickets to shed light on San Jose being the most thinly staffed agency in the state, as well as the City’s implementation of AI without any guardrails, which further jeopardizes quality public services. Workers are forced to do more with less across all city departments. This Strike School session comes as the second of two- the first took place on Saturday, July 25, with hundreds of members in attendance.

Who: Hundreds of City of San Jose employees represented by IFPTE Local 21 and MEF-AFSCME Local 101. Spokespeople will be available for interviews before the members-only program.

What: San Jose Strike School Session #2

When/Where: Wednesday, July 29, 2026, at San Jose First United Methodist Church (24 N 5th St, San Jose, CA 95112). The program begins at 5:30 pm; registration begins at 5:00 pm

Visuals: Workers in blue, green, and teal union shirts, with banners and picket signs

BACKGROUND: In June, after receiving the City’s Last, Best, and Final Offer (LBFO) and working to reach a deal before contract expiration and City Council’s summer recess, San Jose workers called for mediation in order to reach a fair agreement.

Now, at the end of July, members of both unions have been without a contract for over a month. Instead of investing in our community, city officials have elected to spend taxpayer money on corporate giveaways through massive contracts with ineffective AI companies and an outrageous $325 million subsidy towards hockey arena renovations. The City could develop a strategy that ensures corporations pay their fair share from benefitting directly from city services. Instead, San Jose insists on cutting taxes for some of the largest corporations that occupy the city, while residents and working families pay more. Workers are preparing to go on strike if necessary.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/san-jose-city-employees-get-strike-ready-after-several-months-of-stalled-contract-negotiations-with-city-administration-302837042.html

SOURCE IFPTE Local 21

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Modine Publishes 2026 Sustainability Report

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RACINE, Wis., July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Modine (NYSE: MOD), a diversified global leader in thermal management technology and solutions, today announced the publication of its 2026 Sustainability Report. Titled Purpose-Driven Engineering, the report highlights the company’s significant progress in environmental stewardship, including the early achievement of its 2030 targets for both energy and water intensity, alongside major strides in product innovation and strategic transformation.

During fiscal year 2026, Modine accelerated its sustainability momentum. The company achieved reductions in energy and water intensity based on a 2018 baseline, surpassing its 2030 targets for both metrics. Additionally, Modine maintained strong, consistent progress on reducing absolute Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions based on a 2018 baseline.

“FY26 represents a pivotal moment for Modine as global trends continue to accelerate demand for advanced thermal management solutions,” said Neil D. Brinker, Modine President and Chief Executive Officer. “As we move into this next phase of our company, our direction is both ambitious and intentional. We will continue expanding our portfolio of advanced data center and commercial HVAC&R technologies and partnering closely with customers to build infrastructure that is more resilient and more efficient.”

To support the sustainability of these growing markets, Modine introduced new solutions, expanded the use of AI across products and operations, and advanced efforts to further embed sustainability throughout its value chain. As part of these continuous improvement efforts, the company received independent limited assurance on its GHG emissions data for the first time.

Looking ahead, the company plans to develop new forward-looking targets to account for the transformational change in its business and the opportunity to continue serving customers in high-growth markets.

“Our progress this year, particularly in surpassing our 2030 energy and water intensity goals years ahead of schedule, is a testament to the dedication of our global workforce,” said Erin J. Roth, Modine Vice President, General Counsel, Corporate Secretary and Chief Compliance Officer, who leads the company’s sustainability program. “Sustainability is embedded in how we operate and innovate, and we are proud of our collaborative efforts to engineer a cleaner, healthier world.”

Learn more about Modine’s efforts by reading our 2026 Sustainability Report, available at Modine.com.

About Modine
For more than 100 years, Modine has solved the toughest thermal management challenges for mission-critical applications. Our purpose of Engineering a Cleaner, Healthier World™ means we are always evolving our portfolio of technologies to provide the latest heating, cooling, and ventilation solutions. Through the hard work of more than 13,000 employees worldwide, our businesses advance our purpose with systems that improve air quality, reduce energy and water consumption, lower harmful emissions, enable cleaner running vehicles, and use environmentally friendly refrigerants. Modine is a global company headquartered in Racine, Wisconsin (U.S.), with operations in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. For more information about Modine, visit modine.com.

Contact: sustainability@modine.com 

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SOURCE Modine

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Firmable launches MCP, giving sales teams a direct line from any AI tool to verified company and contact data

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New Firmable MCP brings GTM data, CRM context, and buyer intent into Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and more.

SAN FRANCISCO and MELBOURNE, Australia, July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Firmable, the AI-native B2B sales platform, launched its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, giving revenue teams the ability to run go-to-market activity directly from the AI tools they already use. The Firmable MCP is available now through Firmable Connect, a new hub at https://connect.firmable.ai that brings together MCP, webhooks, native CRM integrations, and API access in one place.

Sales teams have spent the past two years bolting AI onto old workflows and legacy data platforms. Reps switch between five tabs to build a single account list. Agents hallucinate company details because they’re working from stale, unverified data. CRMs fill up with duplicate records nobody trusts. The AI tools got smarter. The connection to the data underneath them didn’t keep up.

That gap is exactly what Firmable was built to close. “Every competitor in this space talks AI now,” said Karthik Venkatasubramanian, co-founder and Chief Product & Technology Officer at Firmable. “Most of them mean an AI layer sitting on top of a legacy database. Firmable is AI-native from the ground up, continuously sourcing, assembling, and refreshing accurate data and buying signals, not retrofitting an old system to sound like a new one.”

Firmable’s Lead GTM Engineer Asher Chua will introduce the MCP connector and illustrate its use in a live and recorded webinar on August 12. Register here: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/4817852096930/WN_asz65zH-RXeB85Crg1mlqg

Kieran Krohn is Head of Growth at ScaleStation, a Firmable and HubSpot partner specializing in GTM strategy and processes. “We’re big fans of Firmable and have been impressed with the quality of their data, which is why we recommend them to our customers,” he said. “As we move deeper into a world of AI, we find it more and more useful to be able to leverage Claude as the operating layer that connects into our different systems. Having access to Firmable’s data via MCP makes a huge difference in being able to pull that data and manipulate it with intelligence.”

One connection, five unique processes beneath

The Firmable MCP gives almost any AI tool – Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, Codex, or Cursor – direct access to the Firmable B2B data stack. What makes it different comes down to five layers working together, continuously, before a rep ever types a prompt:

AI-native sourcing. Firmable’s proprietary AI pulls from hundreds of datasets to build its own map of the market, rather than reselling the same licensed feeds most other vendors use. That means more company profiles, deeper decision-maker detail, and stronger mobile and email coverage. Teams switching from Apollo or ZoomInfo consistently uncover meaningful net-new contacts on day one, and in head-to-head testing, Firmable delivers significantly higher verified mobile coverage than these legacy vendors in the same market.Structure at scale. AI agents map, resolve, and clean every record automatically, stripping out bots, inactive accounts, and stale profiles before anything reaches a user. Inefficient manual list curation is not required.Refreshed and verified. Database segments refresh continuously, and every record is cross-checked against live signals, so sellers aren’t calling a number that was disconnected two months ago or emailing someone who changed jobs in the spring.Insights at speed. AI agents scan constantly for what matters: role changes, hiring surges, funding rounds, and surface it as an assigned CRM action, not as a chart buried in a dashboard.Delivered for action. All of this reaches reps wherever they already work, in the Firmable app, through the new MCP connector in Claude and ChatGPT, via two-way CRM sync, or through webhooks and API access for custom workflows.

A rep can now ask their AI assistant to build a list of mid-market SaaS companies in San Francisco and map the buying committee at each one, and get verified, ready-to-action results in one step instead of ten.

Built-in guardrails, not just built-in AI

Firmable’s MCP marketplace, part of Firmable Connect, already contains an industry-leading set of 540 pre-built skills and prompts.

Some, like CRM Push Prep, add a layer that most AI tools skip. Before any list is written to Salesforce, HubSpot, or Microsoft Dynamics 365, CRM Push Prep previews exactly what will be created and what will be updated; flags duplicates; shows the cost and waits for the rep to confirm the list by name. No AI tool gets to write to a CRM unsupervised.

Other popular skills include Account Brief, which pulls firmographics, tech footprint, and ICP fit into one structured answer, and Buying Committee Mapper, which grounds its recommendations in real, verified Firmable contacts weighted by what the rep is selling.

Firmable Connect: one platform, four ways in

Firmable Connect is the new home for this capability. Alongside the MCP, the platform offers webhooks that push job and role changes, funding rounds, and intent spikes straight into Slack or any workflow tool; native two-way sync for HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Microsoft Dynamics 365; and direct API access for teams building on Firmable data. Setup takes seconds: install the MCP, authenticate with OAuth, and run a first GTM skill in under two minutes.

“We didn’t want to be another data vendor with an API bolted on,” said Leigh Jasper, co-founder and co-CEO of Firmable. “Other tools hand you a database and wish you luck, but Firmable is your AI sales teammate. We wanted to meet revenue teams inside the tools they’ve already adopted for AI, and to make sure what shows up there is data they trust enough to act on immediately, with the context they need. Smarter data, sharper timing, that’s the whole bet behind Firmable Connect.”

The launch lands as Firmable accelerates its expansion into the US and Canada, building on its established base across Australia, New Zealand, and wider APAC. The MCP is available today, with a free trial for new users.

Firmable MCP is available now at https://connect.firmable.ai/mcp, where the full skill and prompt marketplace can be browsed, and downloaded into your AI tool. Teams can start a free trial at https://app.firmable.com/sign-up.

About Firmable

Firmable is an AI-native B2B sales platform, your AI sales teammate, that helps revenue teams find, understand, and connect with the right buyers at the right time. Combining verified company and contact data with CRM context, buyer intent, and agentic AI, Firmable powers go-to-market teams across the US and Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. www.firmable.ai

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SOURCE Firmable

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