Recycling, precycling can boost bottom line

by Paul Schreiber

SBJ Contributing Writer

There are a variety of strategies available to businesses to become more environmentally conscious in their operations. Implementing these strategies typically involves rethinking time-worn business practices from initial purchasing of raw materials to the most efficient solution for waste disposal.

Businesses should first look at waste reduction according to Barbara Lucks, materials recovery/education coordinator for the city of Springfield's Solid Waste Management Division.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) offers insights as to how companies can "cut waste in the workplace" in its handbook, "Waste Prevention Pays Off." Through carefully selecting purchases, businesses can begin to reduce the accumulation of ultimate waste by buying materials with minimal packaging or utilizing reusable containers.

Enter the concept of precycling. Here companies focus on items they foresee will produce unnecessary trash. "Precycling relates back to the choice of the products you buy, and choosing to buy things that generate less waste in the first place," Lucks said. "The easiest way to manage solid waste is not to create it."

"From a dollar standpoint, it makes sense because you're paying, more or less, on both ends. You're paying for something you don't need, as well as paying to have something disposed," Lucks added.

Among the other suggestions the EPA offers businesses are: use quality equipment, thereby keeping worn-out machinery out of the waste stream longer; reuse products as long as possible to reduce acquisition and disposal costs; exchange or sell materials no longer required; and reduce or eliminate the use of materials containing hazardous or toxic components.

Two Springfield companies provide examples in respect to this last strategy. For their printing needs, Gospel Publishing House and Sweetheart Cup now use "soy-based ink as opposed to petroleum-based ink products," said Karl Barke,

coordinator of air- quality control for the Springfield-Greene County Health Department.

This switchover greatly reduces the emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the air, according to Barke. Because of this, and similar responses by local businesses, Springfield's air is within the quality limits the EPA has set standards for, he added.

When it comes to environmentally friendly practices, perhaps no activity has received as much exposure as recycling. An effective program of recycling waste or scrap can be a boon to a business. Jon Schimpf, environmental compliance manager at Dayco, knows first hand the impact recycling has on the bottom line.

"We're running yearly cost savings of about $64,000," Schimpf said. The 1997 quantities of recycled material that produced this income for Dayco are staggering: 405,000 pounds of wooden pallets; 350,000 pounds of paper; 70,000 pounds of used oil; 1.2 million pounds of uncured rubber; 90,000 pounds of rubber dust and grindings; and nearly 40,000 pounds of steel barrels.

Schimpf is well aware of the favorable impact this practice is having on the environment. "We recycle 30 to 35 percent of all our solid waste."

He added, "For every hundred pounds in 1990 that went to the landfill, we're pulling out 30 to 35 pounds today."

Schimpf's objective is to keep waste or scrap out of dump sites permanently. Used items often can be reused "as a raw material for a down-graded process in another manufacturing plant," he said. "Regardless of what you put in a landfill," he added, "it lays there forever."

Businesses today can complete the recycling loop of collecting, manufacturing, and purchasing on a consistent basis through their operations, according to the "Buy Recycled Guidebook." By buying recycled-content items, from computer paper and thermal insulation to industrial hoses and I-beams, companies advocate the value of reusing materials and preserving resources.

"It's a mindset," Schimpf said. "People that lived through the Depression learned how to use things up," he added. "That's really what recycling is."

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