BY PETER BRADLEY, EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
SUSTAINABILITY
ACE HARDWARE, THE BIG NATIONwide hardware cooperative, introduced
sustainable practices to its distribution centers long before the term
took on its current cachet. “We’ve
always been doing recycling,”
says Dirk DeYoung, the company’s facilities engineering
manager.
In recent years, Ace has sharpened its focus on sustainable
practices, formally adopting a
sustainability program about five
years ago. The company has achieved
marked success in several areas—
reducing waste from its distribution centers,
cutting its overall energy use in those buildings, shifting to cleaner fuels for its lift truck
fleet, and reducing the carbon footprint of
both its private fleet and its for-hire truckers.
Earlier this year, Ace announced that one
of its major import DCs had achieved “zero
landfill status,” and another is at 95 percent zero landfill. That means that materials
flowing through the facilities are reused or
recycled, and that little or no trash is sent to
landfills or incinerators. Tim Duvall, Ace’s
supply chain director, says he first learned
about the concept at a Council of Supply
Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP)
seminar. “I presented it as a goal [to senior
management],” he says. “I felt like it was the
right thing to do.”
GETTING TO ZERO
The first Ace Hardware facility to earn
zero landfill status was the company’s
336,000-square-foot import redistribution
center in Suffolk, Va. An analysis performed
with Waste Management, Ace’s waste and
recycling contractor, determined that up
to 90 percent of the facility’s waste could
be recycled. The process they implemented
allows the facility to mix recyclables into a
single stream, which is later sorted by Waste
Management for sale and reuse. As a result
of that effort, the facility was able to switch
from a 30-cubic-yard waste container to two
eight-yard containers. “We’ve now reduced
that even further,” Duvall reports.
The remaining solid waste is sent to a
Wheelabrator waste-to-energy incinerator in
Portsmouth, Va. That plant produces steam
for the Norfolk Naval Shipyard as well as
electricity that it sells to the local utility.
Ace operates another import redistribution
center in Kent, Wash., that has reached the
95 percent reuse or recycle mark. That effort
began subsequent to the effort in Suffolk.
“Once we formulated the process, we rolled
it out [in Kent],” Duvall says. It has proved
a bit more difficult, he says—a surprise to
Ace given the Seattle area’s reputation for
environmental awareness. But he says that
the project “has been no less embraced by the
people there.”
The next step will be to roll out the zero
Ace Hardware worked with its waste and recycling
contractor to get one DC to the point where it ships
nothing to a landfill. A second DC is close behind. And that’s
only a part of the hardware cooperative’s sustainability efforts.
specialreport
Heading for
zero
