Processing's Weekly Mixer: When cybersecurity becomes an electrical safety issue, and more
Welcome to the latest installment of Processing's Weekly Mixer, which highlights recent content from EndeavorB2B brands relevant to process manufacturers.
This week's entry features content from Automation World, Control Design, Food Processing and Plant Services, as well as this week's content from Processing.
When cybersecurity becomes an electrical safety issue
Benjamin Langton writes:
Picture a maintenance team responding to an electrical issue during production. The physical assets may look familiar: breakers, motor control centers, drives, relays, control panels, monitoring systems, and the signaling interfaces that support facility safety. The work also sounds familiar: protect people, maintain equipment, restore operations, and prevent the same issue from recurring. What has changed is that many of the decisions behind that work now depend on digital systems that the maintenance team may not fully own, see, or trust.
In connected facilities, automation and operational technology (OT) systems increasingly support each part of the electrical safety lifecycle. They hold device settings, inspection records, alarm histories, condition-monitoring trends, remote access paths, configuration files, engineering workstation data, and system status information. When those systems are accurate, available, and well governed, they strengthen maintenance and safety. When they are unavailable, inaccurate, or exposed to unauthorized changes, the electrical safety cycle becomes weaker than it appears.
That is why cybersecurity is becoming a maintenance and safety issue. The concern is not only whether a facility can prevent a major cyberattack. The more immediate question is whether the systems, data, and access pathways supporting maintenance and safety decisions can be trusted when those decisions matter. If breaker settings are changed without documentation, inspection records are incomplete, condition-monitoring data is unavailable, or remote access to critical systems is poorly governed, the organization may have less confidence in its maintenance program than it assumes.
Read the entire article HERE.
A technical Q&A with industry expert Brian Romano
From Control Design: In the latest episode of Control Intelligence, Mike Bacidore is joined by Brian Romano, director of technology development at Arthur G. Russell Co., executive board member of ISA and long-time collaborator with Control Design. They take a technical deep dive into some of the controls industries' hottest topics.
Listen to the episode below.
Perdue Farms' Lewiston, North Carolina, facility named Food Processing's Green Plant of the Year
With headquarters on the Delmarva peninsula and numerous facilities and chicken suppliers throughout the Chesapeake watershed, it’s no surprise that Perdue Farms has deeply attuned itself to reducing its environmental impact.
This year, for our 16th annual Green Plant of the Year award, Food Processing honors Perdue Farms’ Lewiston, N.C., chicken processing plant for its holistic, multi-faceted approach to sustainability. Lewiston stands as a microcosm of what the company strives to achieve across its entire operations network, says Ben Hildebrand, director of environmental sustainability for Perdue Farms.
“We strive to be the most trusted name in food and agricultural products. To do that in 2026, we have to understand our impact on the ecosystems of the communities we’re working in,” he explains. “Our job is to be the innovator in the industry, to push the envelope, do better, and force the rest of the industry to follow us and demand better.”
The Lewiston facility reflects its parent company’s mentality, and it continues to successfully push for a place as an industry leader. In 2025, the U.S. Poultry & Egg Assn. awarded the Lewiston facility its 2025 Clean Water Award, given annually to poultry facilities that demonstrate exceptional performance in wastewater treatment, water reuse and overall sustainability, with winners selected by a committee of industry engineers and university experts.
Case study: Dow integrates water reuse into Path2Zero processing plant expansion
Dow’s Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, project, called Path2Zero, is already well-known for its ground-breaking commitment to reaching Net Zero Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. The facility retrofit and expansion includes a new ethylene cracker with carbon capture technology, power and steam cogeneration and off-site carbon sequestration. Dow expects the project to triple the site’s ethylene and polyethylene capacity and decarbonize approximately 20% of its global ethylene production. The project will add approximately 1.8 million metric tonnes of ethylene capacity in phases through 2030 and will produce approximately 3.2 million metric tonnes of low- to zero-carbon emissions polyethylene and ethylene derivatives. Since 2005, Dow has made commitments to reduce its net annual carbon emissions by about 30% by 2030.
To make all this sustainable design possible, Dow had to consider another important utility in addition to power generation. Clean water is critical to its processes, and chemical manufacturers are facing stricter guidelines on wastewater disposal. Path2Zero has also been designed around water infrastructure—from treating river water for production to recovering its cooling-tower wastewater and converting it back into usable process and boiler-feed water.
“Water management is central to Path2Zero because manufacturing reliability, operational resilience and environmental performance all depend on having a consistent, high-quality water supply and responsible treatment systems,” says Kreshka Young, North America business director of energy and climate at Dow.
The project’s defining characteristic is its integration of power generation, emissions reduction and water treatment infrastructure, Young adds. “Fort Saskatchewan already operates as a highly integrated manufacturing site, with feedstock, ethylene production, polyethylene production, power, steam, water, storage, rail and logistics all depending on one another. Path2Zero builds on that foundation by expanding and retrofitting the site as one connected system,” she says.
