Eliminating Waste Saves Company Thousands of Dollars

Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Topics: Economy, Environment
Download  RSS  Short URL  Share

Yesterday we brought you the story of how Ohio’s oldest company nearly went bankrupt because of a poorly-worded tax law. The Taylor Companies of Bedford cleaned up a polluted brownfield and then built a new factory on the site. Now, that plant is a model of sustainability. ideastream®’s Dan Bobkoff shows us how being green can be great for a company’s bottom line.

Taylor builds the kind of office furniture you might find in a law firm. And, when a prospective customer comes to their Bedford factory to see their product line, CEO Jeff Baldassari gives them an unusual tour.

BALDASSARI: I kind of give garbage tours as I call them. I go through the factory with the customers and show them how we manufacture the furniture and how the waste is diverted at each stage of the process.

It would be more accurate to call these “no garbage tours” as I learned when Baldassari took me around Taylor’s clean, spacious factory. Nearly every by-product of the manufacturing process is recycled or finds some home other than the trash can. Baldassari points toward the ceiling.

BALDASSARI: See all these tubes going to all the equipment here in the woodshop? That’s part of our dust collection system. And it comes in, goes through here, and there’s a silo outside the building. It collects into a 40 cubic yard dumpster where all that sawdust is taken to a horse farm. 

Taylor produces 38 tons of sawdust a year. The horse farms now use it for composting.
Next, we meet Jeff, who’s stapling upholstery onto a chair.

BALDASSARI: He’ll put his leather scraps…we divert all this leather to Montreal, about three tons a year, and it gets made into purses and wallets. They pay us 20 cents a kilo…they come and pick it up on their own nickel for free.

Baldassari says the company makes about $900 a year by selling their leather scraps. That may not sound like much, but they used to have to pay to have it hauled away. Same goes with wood scraps. Most are now sent away to be burned for thermal energy or turned into plywood. 

Paper, plastic and cardboard that can’t be used for another purpose gets recycled.

All this diversion and recycling has cut Taylor’s trash bill from $20,000 a year to just under a grand.

BALDASSARI: We do not get a “thank you for your business” card each holiday season from our waste hauler. We’re probably their worst customer. 

Baldassari says Taylor has committed to going completely zero-waste by the year 2019. That means there’ll be no need for a trash truck to ever come to their building. He says the company is about 90% there.

By reducing waste and installing energy efficient machinery, Baldassari says going green saves Taylor about $100 grand a year.

BALDASSARI: The guys in the factory, if I tell them, hey, we save $100,000 a year by diverting this waste and saving on energy, they’ll think that’s three jobs that’s been saved. If I talk to people in marketing, they’ll say that’s $2 million in sales. That’s the net residue of $2 million in sales. If I talk to people in accounting, they’ll say our overhead is less.

That’s the direct benefit to the bottom line. But Taylor and other companies also find that eliminating waste makes for good marketing.

AD SOUND: There’s a place in this country where the air is fresh. There’s zero-landfill. Where nearly everything is recycled. 

When a Subaru plant stopped sending trash to a landfill, it ran this TV ad to make sure customers were aware.

AD SOUND: Some people call it a little piece of heaven, we call it the Subaru plant here in Indiana.

Roger Saillant is the new head of the Fowler Center for Sustainable Value at Case Western Reserve University. He says it’s just taking some time for more firms to get on board.

SAILLANT: I think there are three stages that companies in the world can be divided in. Those in absolute denial, and that number is getting smaller. Those that are looking at speaking green and speaking sustainable because they can greenwash and get some benefits from it, but even they are being seduced into taking real action. And, the people that are courageous enough to be out there, really leading the way.

Saillant says he’s never heard of a company not improving its bottom line by reducing waste.

Taylor’s Baldassari freely admits that money was his motivator.

He likens going green to the tax break you get when you give to charity. And, he admits that some of his longtime friends are amused by this CEO’s turn toward environmentalism.

BALDASSARI: A lot of them are, yes. I’m not a treehugger by any means. But by the same token, I’m a huge, huge fan of sustainability

For once, a true win-win.