amazing volcano

apropos of nothing - just some stunning photography on this blog

is all plastic all bad?

One of the things that stuck me most in my previous blog, about Subaru's zero-landfill plant in the US, was their use of re-usable plastic boxes that suppliers were obliged to use when sending components to the factory. The simple idea was that using robust packaging all but eliminated the need for wooden pallets and in particular, cardboard - both of which are relatively fragile, generate a heavy carbon footprint to produce and create a voluminous waste stream.

Through my work I recently visited two supermarket distribution 'hubs' (both terrifyingly huge, airport terminal sized monsters), but they both had an employee, gloriously titled Environmental Champion, responsible for ensuring that all that could be done, was being done. I was there to help them re-cycle the unavoidable number of wooden pallets they use, but I was impressed by the amount of heavy-duty plastic crates they now use for many of their products. The producers co-own the boxes with the supermarket; sharing costs and responsibility and in a stroke eliminating a large waste management cost for both companies.

This is all very well hidden in the back loading dock where fickle customers don't see them, but it's become increasingly clear that even green-minded consumers think all plastic is bad. And this is a deep and complicated problem that is at the core of our waste problem. There's a lot more to this but I'll let the following article, in the gruniad back in March, explain....

Riverford Organics, one of the largest vegetable box schemes in the UK, has suggested it may move away from cardboard packaging and towards plastic. In this week's note to customers, Guy Watson at Riverford says that plastic boxes could reduce the carbon footprint of the company's packaging by 70%. He strongly hints that the company wants to move to plastic immediately but is frightened of the reaction of customers.

This issue is an important one. Householders continue to see plastic as wicked and paper-based goods as benign. But when considered over the entire life of the packaging, paper and cardboard embody far more greenhouse gases than their plastic equivalents. Paper products take substantial amounts of energy to make. Crushing a tree down into small fibres, mixing the wood pulp into a slurry and then passing the wet mass through huge rollers cannot be done without use of enormous quantities of power. Making paper and cardboard is almost certainly the third largest industrial use of energy on the planet. By contrast, plastic is light, durable and its manufacture is generally not particularly energy intensive – at least by comparison to paper. A second concern is that many paper and cardboard products, probably including Riverford boxes, end up in local authority landfill, where they rot down anaerobically, creating the greenhouse gas methane in the process. Plastic, as is well known, doesn't rot and sequesters its carbon for ever.

Guy Watson's company delivers its products to homes in cardboard boxes that can be returned to the delivery driver the following week. Watson says that the boxes are designed to last for ten delivery cycles before being recycled. They typically only actually survive four outings before they are lost or made unusable. Because these boxes are 'free', the householder doesn't look after them properly. As a result, about 10% of the total carbon footprint of the business is derived from making and recycling the boxes. This is about the same figure as the carbon cost of shipping the Riverford vegetables to the local distribution hubs. If I have done the calculations correctly, the carbon cost of its boxes would be greater than plastic replacements even if they did actually last 10 cycles and were never used, as the company says, 'to let the dog give birth in'.

85% of our packaging footprint is made up of paper and cardboard yet our customers are very happy with this packaging; virtually all negative comments on packaging relate to plastic punnets and bags which contribute only 8% to the footprint.

It is the customer who is stopping Guy Watson and his colleagues using long-lasting plastic for any form of packaging, not economics or carbon accounting. Watson despairs of getting householders to understand the true environmental cost of paper goods and one can only sympathise as he demands government action to force suppliers to recognize and account for the full cost of packaging.

We all need to understand, far better than we do now, that anything that doesn't last – like paper for packaging – is almost certainly a far greater problem than an almost infinitely recyclable plastic crate. Yes, of course, plastic is an increasingly serious litter problem, in the UK and elsewhere. But it is not a significant cause of CO2 pollution compared to paper.

As a devoted customer, my suggestion to Guy Watson is that he pushes ahead with plastic – perhaps only with customers who agree in advance – and gives us a small price reduction but imposes heavy deposits on each plastic crate left on our doorstep each week. If we don't leave the box out next week, we get charged. Painful, but there is nothing like a punch in the wallet to get people to change behaviour. In the longer run, a 'closed loop' recycling system using plastic crates is infinitely more environmentally sustainable than one based on cardboard boxes.

Subaru's zero-landfill car plant

I blogged about this remarkable achievement - from an unlikely industry - some months ago, but my swish new design rendered it unreadable, so here it is again. The original was by Sara Snow on treehugger.com

There is a Subaru plant along a stretch of I-65 that you can't miss if you happen to find yourself about an hour north of Indianapolis, travelling toward Chicago. It's a 2.9 million square foot facility (with 3.4 million usable square feet including a second floor) that covers over 70 football fields. It's big, but I can't say that this particular plant looks all that different than any other from the outside.

But get inside (they offer a 90 minute tour) and you'll learn that not only was it the first auto assembly plant in the U.S. to achieve zero-landfill status, but they took that to heart and have gone a lot further.

I learned a great deal as my husband and I toured through the facility under the leadership of their master guide, Tom Elgin, but it was when we sat down with the manager of safety and environmental compliance, Denise Coogan that how hard they work to go beyond expectations really became apparent.

Subaru is a Japanese automaker, a country where they're often thinking ahead of us because they simply don't have the space for landfills. It was from the top down that the zero-landfill directive came. So the plant set to work figuring out new uses for their trash in order to achieve zero-landfill status.

Their three biggest waste sources have always been steel (it's a highly valuable recyclable, so there's no problem in getting rid of that), cardboard (also easily recycled), and pallets (which are also recycled). While they found that it was easy enough to find ways to recycle or re-use this type of trash, they wanted to find a way to cut down on the amount of trash they were producing in the first place.

Originally 30% of their waste was paper from the bathrooms and cafeteria. That all went to an incinerator where it was burned and turned into steam energy. And though that met the requirements for a zero-landfill facility, it wasn't good enough for the higher-ups at SIA (Subaru of Indiana Automotive); they wanted to do better. Now they use biodegradable paper products (some made from corn) and have set up two 90 gallon composters behind the plant where the paper products and other food scraps are turned into nutrient dense soil that employs can come and pick up for their own gardens on weekends.

One of the other biggest contributors to their waste stream was all of the shipping materials their suppliers used when shipping various parts in. So SAI started providing their suppliers with big plastic bins that they could fill with parts and ship back. The bins, much like the ones you use to store out of season clothes or old sports equipment in your basement, can be used over and over again, cutting down on the need for disposable shipping boxes.

They found that their single largest energy expenditure came in the form of the 4 air compressors used around the facility. Though the air itself can't be recycled per-se, it can be used more efficiently. Through a series of checks and balances they were able to cut down to 2 air compressors, which cut their energy costs literally in half.

They even made changes to the paint application process. They use a water-born paint now, which is much less toxic than the old type. And their application process has an 85% efficiency, up 30% from the old application method. A company just east of Chicago reclaims the paint runoff.

At SAI, their belief is that waste is just a raw material with a next use that hasn't yet been discovered. Discover that use, and it's no longer waste.

The same was the case for the additional land where the plant resides. Wasted land? Definitely not.

The plant sits on 836 acres but the manufacturing facility only uses about 500 of those acres. The remaining 300+ acres have been turned into dedicated wildlife zones. In fact, there's a pond, right in the middle of the test track, that serves as a blue heron sanctuary and a bald eagle migration zone. Pretty remarkable.