How to Remove Tons of Junk From the Landfill Each Year

If you've visited the blog before, you might have noticed that we're into Lean Manufacturing. That means in everything we do we try to eliminate waste. Sometimes that comes in the form of streamlining our processes in the plant, and sometimes that literally means preventing junk from ending up in the landfill. Today we're talking about the latter. In 2016 we eliminated an estimated 3,000 pounds of waste from the landfill by starting to collect film plastics for recycling. The process started in 2015, when we noticed that film plastic -- which was no longer being collected as recyclables by our local recycling company -- was a large portion of our landfill waste. Our Green Team started looking for potential solutions and found one when Alissa Nichols, our Assembly Production Manager, said her children's school was participating in a national competition to collect used grocery bags and other film plastic. We decided to participate and sent our used plastic wrapping to the collection site: a local grocery store. All the plastics collected there are eventually turned into composite wood material often used for deck material. After the competition was over, we found a way to get our own recycling container and have been doing it ever since. It's just one of the many ways our employees and Green Team have been working to minimize our company's impact on the environment.