Green Manufacturer - January/February 2012

(left to right) Ryan Pennington, Freightliner Custom Chassis Corp.; Bill Harris, Freightliner Custom Chassis Corp.; Glen Jones, Burt’s Bees; Matt Green, Heritage Interactive Services; Wendell Hughes, Honda of South Carolina Mfg. Inc.; and Tom Carpenter, Waste Management, shared their zero-landfill success stories with attendees at the Zero-Waste-to-Landfill Challenge at the Research Triangle Park, N.C., on Dec. 7. The event was sponsored by the Green Manufacturer Network.

way, you’re handling it only one time.”
Pennington and Harris helped em-
ployees quickly identify which recycla-
ble material should be deposited where
by color-coding the collection contain-
ers and posting a simple color chart.
“Color-coding reduced our landfill waste
by 40 percent,” Pennington reported.

Hughes said his team regularly conducts an audit of the recycling contain-ers to see if they have been contaminat-

Honda IAC Group P&G Rodon Group Subaru Thomas Built Buses

Manufacturers Gone Zero Landfill

Burt’s Bees
Da-Lite Screen
Co. Inc.
DMAX Ltd.
Freightliner Custom
Chassis Corp.
GM
Karl Storz
Malt-O-Meal
Metcam Inc.

BMW Dordan Mfg. GE Healthcare Technologies Energizer Battery Co. Greif Inc . Hearthside Food Solutions Honeymoon Paper Products Hypertherm Inc. Ingersoll Rand JL Clark Inc. Johnson & Johnson Consumer

ed with other materials, such as food waste with paper, he said. A report with a score goes to upper management.

He added that the team also tracks the ratio of waste recycled to that sent to incineration for waste-to-energy processes. Currently 88 percent is recycled and 12 percent goes to waste-to-energy outlets, he said.

Honda recycles a multitude of materials, including bulk polystyrene, compact plastic drums, and copper weld tips (see Figure 4). The manufacturer uses a horizontal baler for steel scrap. Many components are shipped to and from suppliers and customers on reusable crates (see Figure 5).

“We do a lot of plastic recycling,” Hughes said. After it is sorted by plastic type, which is stamped on the container bottoms, the plastic is shredded on-site. Hughes said that part of his team’s assessment was looking at the overall impact of recycling to make sure it was not a financial burden.

Subaru enlisted the services of Heritage Interactive Services to help with its monumental task of achieving zero landfill. Matt Green, senior program manager for Heritage, said he places an emphasis on how to generate cost savings by eliminating waste. He said some of the best sources for ideas on how to do that and collect data were from production employees. “We asked them for ideas. They gave us 5,000 suggestions in the first month.”

Green emphasized the importance
of semantics when discussing waste
management with employees. “Trash is
one of the new seven dirty words,” he
said. “Stop calling it trash or garbage.
Come up with something else. If you
don’t call it trash, maybe they’ll think of
it differently.”
“If something is not a product, it’s
byproduct,” Burt’s Bees’ Jones said.

3. Sort, Label, Flake, Chop, Melt to Maximize Value. Although single-stream recycling is common, sorting increases the value of the waste, Waste Management’s Carpenter said. “You don’t have to pay to separate it twice.” In addition, manufacturers can increase the value of some materials by processing them on-site. For example, if plastic is flaked, its per-pound value increases.