turning trash into cash
Making a distribution operation more eco-friendly doesn’t necessarily require investing mil-
lions of dollars in solar panels or new material handling equipment. For specialty food
maker Stonewall Kitchen, it was a simple matter of changing the way it disposed of discarded packing material from inbound shipments. Rather than sending it to a landfill,
the company launched a program to separate out materials suitable for recycling and
then selling them. That single step netted the company $50,000 in 2008.
Based in York, Maine, Stonewall Kitchen makes specialty and gourmet foods,
including jams, jellies, and baking mixes. The privately held company, which recorded sales of more than $50 million last year, manufactures its products at a plant in
York. After manufacture, it stores the products at the plant for about 48 hours to conduct quality testing before moving them to a 120,000-square-foot distribution center
in Rochester, N.H., about 20 miles west of York.
Although the company had done some recycling in the past, it didn’t launch a full-blown initiative until 2007. Supervisor Charlie Baker, who spearheaded the effort, says that
a waste audit by the company’s regional trash hauler prompted him to get serious about
recycling. “It felt like we were doing the wrong thing throwing it in the Dumpster,” says Baker.
The company started its recycling program in 2007 with cardboard, and then added
aluminum and plastic in 2008. In 2007, the gourmet food maker recycled 165 of its 295
tons of waste—or 56 percent.
For Stonewall, the program has proved profitable on several fronts. To begin with, it is able to
sell the discarded materials to its regional trash hauler, which also picks up the recyclables and hauls
them away. Until this past October, when the market for recycled commodities tanked, the company
was earning $125 a ton for recycled cardboard, says Baker. In the last quarter of 2008, the price for a ton of
cardboard plunged to $15. Still, the recycling program netted the company $7,000 in 2007 and $30,000 in 2008.
Not only does Stonewall Kitchen receive cash for its recyclable material, but it also avoids waste hauling charges and the
$90-a-ton tipping fees it would otherwise pay to dump the material in a landfill. In 2008, the company would have
incurred about $14,000 in tipping fees along with another $5,600 for hauling that trash away. Taken together, the
payments and savings netted the company $50,000 this past year.
Baker notes that while the environmental stewardship aspects of the program appeal to the company’s managers, it’s the cost savings that have really grabbed their attention. When he presented the recycling program’s
results to top management in October, the company decided to form a special “green team” of employees to
find other environmental initiatives. “We’re looking at changing lighting systems and other ways to save
money,” says Baker.
cy ( 47 percent). (For a look at what two
companies are doing to make their DC
operations more sustainable, see the
accompanying sidebars.) Forty percent
said they were working to reduce the
amount of packaging material used, and an
equal number reported that they were using
recyclable containers or pallets. By contrast,
only 13 percent said they were experimenting
with using fuel cells to power their lift trucks. (For
a complete list, see the accompanying chart.)
It was pretty much the same story with sustainability initiatives in the respondents’ transportation operations.
Here again, it was evident that the companies that have
launched green initiatives have favored tried-and-true
approaches over the experimental. When it came to trans-portation-related green programs, the top three choices
(each of which was cited by 12 percent of the respondents)
were using aerodynamic trucks, purchasing hybrid or electric trucks, and hiring only motor carriers that have joined
the Environmental Protection Agency’s SmartWay
Transport program. (Truckers participating in the
SmartWay program commit to reducing their fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.) Programs
involving relatively unproven technologies, like the use of
biofuels ( 9 percent) and alternatives to diesel for powering
refrigerated trailers ( 3 percent), appeared at the bottom of
the list.
