Keeping it earth friendly

By Charles Sowell  

DECEMBER 17, 2009 8:50 a.m. (0)

It took dumpster diving and an essential change in Southern culture for Freightliner Custom Chassis to go from 250,000 pounds of landfill trash a month to zero.

Admittedly the South, overall, has been a late comer to environmental consciousness, said Bill Harris, environmental engineering supervisor with Freightliner in Gaffney.

“But once we convinced our people this was the way to go things started snowballing,” he said.

They snowballed so fast that the plant met its zero waste goal on Oct. 29, three months ahead of schedule.

Freightliner in Gaffney is a Daimler subsidiary and the German automaker has something of a history of environmental consciousness, as do most European companies, Harris said. It is a culture that at first seems alien to average Southerners.

“Look where you’re at,” said Harris. “We’re in the solid South. Twenty years ago we poured our used motor oil into the creek behind the house. Today we’ve come a long way and are a finalist for the Daimler environmental leadership award. We’re going to Stuttgart Germany in March to compete against the big boys.”

Harris said it is an honor to be invited to the event, but it isn’t a measure of how good the Gaffney plant is in the grand scheme of environmental stewardship.

“We don’t have solar panels on our roof here, there’s no ambient lighting on the shop floor,” he said. “But if you want to measure where we are today versus where we were (before the zero waste push), then I think we can stand up with anybody.”

It took a lot to get the plant there, said Ryan Pennington, a 13-year veteran with Freightliner who helps oversee the zero waste program.

The Gaffney plant was selected by Daimler corporate officials as a zero landfill prototype in January 2007, Pennington said and a push started to get top management on board with the program.

“This stuff ain’t rocket science,” Harris said, “Once you get the top people onboard, you start working with the next level down” and so on until the whole plant is working from the same sheet of music.

Understanding the why of all the effort it takes to go landfill free was their biggest obstacle, Pennington said.

“We were already recycling, so one of the first steps we took was to inventory our waste stream,” he said — dumpster diving by another name.

To their surprise Freightliner found out that nearly all of the stuff going to the landfill were materials they were already ostensibly recycling.

“Obviously, we could have been doing a better job,” Pennington said.

So they did.

Using portions of a recycling template from the state Department of Health and Environmental Control and bits of a program from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Freightliner’s green team cobbled together a program. One they willingly share with any interested industries.

“Our waste stream is about what you’d expect for a company of our type,” Harris said. “We essentially build custom coachwork for buses, vans and trucks. Plastics, wood, metal scraps and the like are the things we used to send to the landfill.”

There were other things, too, like LOTS of packing Styrofoam.

That particular material is considered hugely detrimental to the environment.

“It has a high carbon footprint and essentially doesn’t break down for many years,” Pennington said. “Today we ship with re-useable materials whenever possible.”

Green team members, drawn from all levels of the company, worked hard to reinforce the recycling message, Pennington said.

“There was some blowback from the shop floor at first, to be sure,” said Harris. “But once people started to see results things smoothed out.”

Freightliner has exported their recycling program locally to Gaffney High School, Harris said. “Once others saw we’d (Freightliner) bought into it, it was a lot easier to sell the idea.”

The recycling program is what Harris called revenue neutral. “We don’t do this to make a profit,” he said. “Most of the stuff we recycle has a pretty low value.”

But recycling does have value in things like job training at Goodwill Industries who sort material from Freightliner for recycling and in saving landfill space.

Cherokee County doesn’t have a landfill, Pennington said. So fuel savings added to the revenue neutral picture.