mjyuen
08-10-2005, 09:54 AM
Pretty cool article.
At Clean Plants, It's Waste Not
By Dan Orzech
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/planet/0,2782,68448,00.html
Each week, hundreds of new Subaru and Isuzu cars and trucks roll out of the Subaru factory in Lafayette, Indiana. What doesn't come out of the plant is garbage. When the garbage truck rolls up to the curb in front of your house each week, it haul away more trash than is generated by the manufacturing processes at the factory.
The factory is the first auto assembly plant in North America to become completely waste-free: last year, 100 percent of the waste steel, plastic and other materials coming out of the plant were reused or recycled. Paint sludge that used to be thrown away, for example, is now dried to a powder and shipped to a plastics manufacturer, ending up eventually as parking lot bumpers and guardrails. What can't be reused -- about 3 percent of the plant's trash -- is shipped off to Indianapolis and incinerated to generate electricity.
Subaru is not alone. Lots of other companies are shipping far less garbage to landfills than they did even a few years ago. Cascade Engineering, a Grand Rapids, Michigan, plastics manufacturer that makes parts for cars and various plastic containers -- including trash cans -- has cut the amount of trash it sends to landfills from 2,475 tons in 2003 to just over 700 tons this year. "We've gone from every-other-day pickups to once every couple of weeks," says Kelley Losey, an environmental services manager at the company.
In 2001, HP managed to keep just over three-quarters of its trash out of landfills around the world. Now that figure is 84 percent. Xerox is reusing or recycling 90 percent of its waste. Three of Toyota's manufacturing plants in the United States have reached the 95 percent level, as has Fetzer Vineyards, one of the country's largest winemakers.
In the 1980s and '90s, "even the best companies were only diverting 60 percent or 65 percent of their waste from landfills," says Wayne Rifer, an associate at the nonprofit Zero Waste Alliance in Portland, Oregon. "In the last five years, we've seen a whole new way of thinking about the problem of waste."
Going green is good public relations, of course. It can also, however, be good business.
"Anything that's waste is an inefficiency in the process, and inefficiency is lost dollars," says Patricia Calkins, vice president for environment, health and safety at Xerox.
Skyrocketing landfill costs during the late 1980s and early 1990s helped make that clear to companies. The average cost to dump a ton of garbage in a U.S. landfill jumped from $8 in 1985 to $34 in 1995, according to the National Solid Wastes Management Association.
Landfill costs have climbed only slightly since then, but in parts of the country where land is at a premium, companies can pay far higher rates. It costs Fetzer Vineyards $61 a ton to dump its trash, says Patrick Healy, the company's environmental manager. Cutting its waste stream has saved the winemaker an estimated $150,000.
There's also far greater awareness of the risks of dumping garbage. Much of that awareness has come from the publicity around Superfund sites and industrial landfills gone bad, says David Lear, HP's vice president of corporate, social and environmental responsibility. "We've seen too many companies who didn't think through what they were putting in the ground," he says. "It may have been done legally at the time, but it's come back to haunt them.
"So even if we feel that a material is benign, we're very hesitant to put anything in the ground," Lear says. "We believe it's worth paying a couple of pennies today to avoid any sort of environmental risk down the line."
Customers are steering companies toward greener business practices as well. "In the early to mid-'90s, our customers were telling us, 'You have to do something about carpet going into the landfill,'" says Dobbin Callahan, general manager for government for carpet maker Collins & Aikman Floorcoverings in Dalton, Georgia. "Used carpet is one of the single largest industrial materials in landfills."
Collins & Aikman spent about $20 million on machinery that could chop up carpet and turn it into pellets, which it could then use to make backing for new carpets.
That enabled the company to begin recycling both used carpet from customers and carpet scraps left over from its manufacturing process. "The technology we developed to recycle old carpet works just as well for our internal manufacturing waste," Callahan says. "We've gone from sending a significant amount of leftover carpet to our local landfill to essentially zero manufacturing waste."
Cutting its landfill fees has saved the company an estimated $1 million. It has saved several million dollars more by reducing the amount of raw materials it buys.
Not every approach to cutting the waste stream is as involved. Subaru used to simply throw away the brass lug nuts that held wheels in place during shipping. That added up to roughly 33,000 pounds of brass a year. Now it sends them back to the supplier, which reuses them until they're worn out, at which point they're recycled.
Subaru has also made reducing waste a part of its plant managers' performance evaluations, says Mark Siwiec, an environmental manager at the factory in Indiana.
"We asked them to come up with projects to improve recycling and reduce the amount of waste we throw into the trash. We also started looking at what goes in the trash, to see what we could reuse or recycle," he says.
The best way to cut waste, says HP's Lear, is not to produce it in the first place. The company changed the design of its plastic molding tools, for example, to eliminate a lot of the plastic material that was used between parts as runners. "That was all scrap that just went to the floor," Lear says. "The biggest win is not recycling, but engineering the material out of your system so you don't need to worry about landfilling it."
At Clean Plants, It's Waste Not
By Dan Orzech
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/planet/0,2782,68448,00.html
Each week, hundreds of new Subaru and Isuzu cars and trucks roll out of the Subaru factory in Lafayette, Indiana. What doesn't come out of the plant is garbage. When the garbage truck rolls up to the curb in front of your house each week, it haul away more trash than is generated by the manufacturing processes at the factory.
The factory is the first auto assembly plant in North America to become completely waste-free: last year, 100 percent of the waste steel, plastic and other materials coming out of the plant were reused or recycled. Paint sludge that used to be thrown away, for example, is now dried to a powder and shipped to a plastics manufacturer, ending up eventually as parking lot bumpers and guardrails. What can't be reused -- about 3 percent of the plant's trash -- is shipped off to Indianapolis and incinerated to generate electricity.
Subaru is not alone. Lots of other companies are shipping far less garbage to landfills than they did even a few years ago. Cascade Engineering, a Grand Rapids, Michigan, plastics manufacturer that makes parts for cars and various plastic containers -- including trash cans -- has cut the amount of trash it sends to landfills from 2,475 tons in 2003 to just over 700 tons this year. "We've gone from every-other-day pickups to once every couple of weeks," says Kelley Losey, an environmental services manager at the company.
In 2001, HP managed to keep just over three-quarters of its trash out of landfills around the world. Now that figure is 84 percent. Xerox is reusing or recycling 90 percent of its waste. Three of Toyota's manufacturing plants in the United States have reached the 95 percent level, as has Fetzer Vineyards, one of the country's largest winemakers.
In the 1980s and '90s, "even the best companies were only diverting 60 percent or 65 percent of their waste from landfills," says Wayne Rifer, an associate at the nonprofit Zero Waste Alliance in Portland, Oregon. "In the last five years, we've seen a whole new way of thinking about the problem of waste."
Going green is good public relations, of course. It can also, however, be good business.
"Anything that's waste is an inefficiency in the process, and inefficiency is lost dollars," says Patricia Calkins, vice president for environment, health and safety at Xerox.
Skyrocketing landfill costs during the late 1980s and early 1990s helped make that clear to companies. The average cost to dump a ton of garbage in a U.S. landfill jumped from $8 in 1985 to $34 in 1995, according to the National Solid Wastes Management Association.
Landfill costs have climbed only slightly since then, but in parts of the country where land is at a premium, companies can pay far higher rates. It costs Fetzer Vineyards $61 a ton to dump its trash, says Patrick Healy, the company's environmental manager. Cutting its waste stream has saved the winemaker an estimated $150,000.
There's also far greater awareness of the risks of dumping garbage. Much of that awareness has come from the publicity around Superfund sites and industrial landfills gone bad, says David Lear, HP's vice president of corporate, social and environmental responsibility. "We've seen too many companies who didn't think through what they were putting in the ground," he says. "It may have been done legally at the time, but it's come back to haunt them.
"So even if we feel that a material is benign, we're very hesitant to put anything in the ground," Lear says. "We believe it's worth paying a couple of pennies today to avoid any sort of environmental risk down the line."
Customers are steering companies toward greener business practices as well. "In the early to mid-'90s, our customers were telling us, 'You have to do something about carpet going into the landfill,'" says Dobbin Callahan, general manager for government for carpet maker Collins & Aikman Floorcoverings in Dalton, Georgia. "Used carpet is one of the single largest industrial materials in landfills."
Collins & Aikman spent about $20 million on machinery that could chop up carpet and turn it into pellets, which it could then use to make backing for new carpets.
That enabled the company to begin recycling both used carpet from customers and carpet scraps left over from its manufacturing process. "The technology we developed to recycle old carpet works just as well for our internal manufacturing waste," Callahan says. "We've gone from sending a significant amount of leftover carpet to our local landfill to essentially zero manufacturing waste."
Cutting its landfill fees has saved the company an estimated $1 million. It has saved several million dollars more by reducing the amount of raw materials it buys.
Not every approach to cutting the waste stream is as involved. Subaru used to simply throw away the brass lug nuts that held wheels in place during shipping. That added up to roughly 33,000 pounds of brass a year. Now it sends them back to the supplier, which reuses them until they're worn out, at which point they're recycled.
Subaru has also made reducing waste a part of its plant managers' performance evaluations, says Mark Siwiec, an environmental manager at the factory in Indiana.
"We asked them to come up with projects to improve recycling and reduce the amount of waste we throw into the trash. We also started looking at what goes in the trash, to see what we could reuse or recycle," he says.
The best way to cut waste, says HP's Lear, is not to produce it in the first place. The company changed the design of its plastic molding tools, for example, to eliminate a lot of the plastic material that was used between parts as runners. "That was all scrap that just went to the floor," Lear says. "The biggest win is not recycling, but engineering the material out of your system so you don't need to worry about landfilling it."