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The sight of auto workers crawling through dumpsters suggests tough times in the auto industry, but Honda of America Mfg. workers have been doing it for years to ferret out waste.
The auto maker says today that 10 of its 14 manufacturing plants in North America now send zero waste to landfills, and the remaining four dump only small amounts of paper and plastic trash from their cafeterias to landfills.
Considering that auto plants generate millions of pounds of offal every year, it is a significant accomplishment, and Honda gives much of the credit to its garbage-picking workers for eliminating 4.4 billion lbs. (2 billion kg) of waste material that would have been sent to landfills during the past 10 years.
Karen Heyob, a manager who oversees Honda’s green factory initiatives in North America, says the total amount of industrial waste the auto maker sends to landfills has dwindled from 62.8 lbs. (28.4 kg ) per vehicle produced in fiscal-year 2001, to an estimated 1.8 lbs. (0.8 kg) per vehicle in the current fiscal year.
To better understand where all the waste was coming from, Honda officials say teams of employees actually combed through dumpsters and piles of plant refuse to determine origins.
They identified and implemented hundreds of waste-reduction and recycling initiatives, from finding ways to reduce metal scrap in stamping processes to changing the ways parts were packaged to minimizing the use of paper and plastic in cafeterias.
Many of the recycling and waste-reduction activities were undertaken through programs where teams of Honda employees engage in an annual competition to improve Honda’s value to society, a spokesman says.
In the case of cafeteria rubbish, most Honda plants switched to washable dishware and disposing of solid waste through composting, recycling and energy recovery, which usually entails burning waste to generate electricity.
