How Can Manufacturers Reduce Waste Volumes?

Municipal wastes. The least troublesome of industrial wastes are officially called “municipal solid wastes,” but more colloquially “trash” or “garbage.” This is the kind of waste that garbage trucks routinely pick up in front of homes, schools, hospitals, and businesses. E.g., product packaging, furniture, clothing, bottles, food scraps, newspapers, etc.

Industrial wastes (aka manufacturing wastes). These include a wide variety of non-hazardous materials that are useless, unwanted byproducts of manufacturing. These are not hazardous wastes, which are endemically dangerous or harmful to human health or the environment. As such, industrial wastes don’t require hazardous waste management. Nonetheless, they might require special handling per the EPA, OSHA, DOT, or some state or local authority.

Hazardous wastes. These are a complicated topic in and of themselves. Suffice to say that something must be “listed,” “acutely hazardous,” or “characteristic” to be considered an intrinsically hazardous waste, and therefore in need of RCRA-compliant hazardous waste disposal. Otherwise, it’s probably an industrial waste or (less likely) a municipal one.

Measure your waste streams. Knowing the categorical amounts of industrial, hazardous, and municipal waste you’re generating is logically the first step in reducing the amounts of each.

Your waste hauler can provide numbers in terms of pounds per pickup. Or, if you’re using front-loading bins, you can conduct “bin audits” before each pickup to estimate the total cubic yards that you’re disposing of.

It’s also important to know how much each department in your manufacturing facility is contributing to your three waste streams (e.g., warehousing, offices, food services, grounds, construction, manufacturing, vehicle maintenance, etc.).

Once you know how much waste you’re generating and from where, your managers and/or key employees can set goals for reducing the quantities by some reasonable percentage.

Analyze your waste streams. This involves separating and measuring individual waste streams to determine how the materials in each might be reduced, reused, repurposed, or recycled. Any amount of materials you can divert from a waste stream into a recycling program commensurately reduces the disposal costs for that waste stream. This benefits you in four ways:

Quantify your organic-waste generation. This is another possible component of waste-stream analysis. Even if you have no organic waste that’s a byproduct of your manufacturing, consider food waste traceable to your cafeterias and breakrooms. You might want to hire an organics recycling service. Some states are now (or soon to be) requiring businesses that generate significant amounts of organic wastes to do so.

Train your managers and employees. You can’t merely suggest to managers and employees that they become more thoughtful about what they dispose of and where they put it. A waste reduction program won’t work unless it’s formalized, employees are well informed about it, and there are incentives for compliance (and, perhaps, disincentives for noncompliance). This requires employee meetings, company newsletters, incentive programs, and similar human-resource strategies.

Invest in signage. Everyone needs reminders. Signage provides them. For example, people are less likely to throw wastepaper into a general waste bin if there’s a blue one next to it with a sign above it, reminding them to recycle paper. Likewise, an aluminum recycling bin next to the soda machine, with a recycling sign above it, decreases the chances that cans will wind up in the general trash.

Also, signage placed throughout your facility that generally promotes recycling and waste reduction can help instill those values into your internal business culture, greatly increasing acceptance and compliance for your manufacturing-waste reduction efforts.

Choosing the optimal dumpster(s) for your size of plant or factory

Supplying specific kinds of waste and recycling bins for smooth onsite transit & handling of waste

Recommending specialized equipment for your particular kind(s) of waste stream(s)

Developing recycling programs that allow you to reuse and/or repurpose manufacturing byproducts

President, COO