Category Archives: Sustainability

Garbage In, Garden Out: Trash Processing Goes High Tech

Wired recently had a short, graphical, article, on the new trash processing facility in Sydney, Australia that was built by Global Renewables in its effort to shrink the millions of tons of recyclables that end up in landfills every year. A high-tech marvel of a processing plant that uses technology that includes wind sifters, optical scanners, magnets, and electrical currents, it is capable of diverting 75% of a city’s waste stream to recycling. This significantly cuts down on landfill space requirements, methane production (from rotting garbage), and greenhouse gas emissions.

The 6-step plus process, depicted in the graphic linked through the thumbnail below, is quite ingenious.

  1. Robotic Arms open the trash-bags (to prevent workers from injuring themselves on dangerous or hazardous materials) and then workers remove contaminants and toxic materials for safe disposal. The rest of the trash is allowed to proceed on a conveyor belt.
  2. A vacuum separates paper and plastic, which are separated by optical scanners.
  3. Electrical eddy currents subject the trash to a magnetic field which makes the nonferrous metals actually ‘jump’ into a bin.
  4. Electromagnets attract ferrous metals and a small belt channels the material into a separate chamber for compacting and resale as scrap.
  5. A computer-guided camera tracks paper and plastic and air jets blow the refuse into appropriate bins.
  6. What’s left is fed into a percolate tank and washed with warm water to dissolve readily soluble carbon and other organic compounds. The liquid enters a digester which turns the dissolved carbon into bio-gas to power the plant. A composting hall ferments everything else into fertilizer.

The Seven Deadly Supply Chain Sins

Over on the World Future Society, there’s a great piece in the President’s Web Log where he recounts a creative interpretation of the sins of the future. What really got my attention is how each of them have their supply chain equivalents, and how the first five in particular require very little modification. So, without further ado, here are the seven deadly supply chain sins.

  • Earthism
    Holding humans superior over all other life-forms, and putting our needs over the needs of the other species we share the planet with. This can take the form of plotting a sea-lane through areas wales like to call home or of a new highway through areas of woodland where animals on the precipice of the endangered species list live.
  • Harmful Technology Replication
    The reproduction of environmentally dangerous means of production, power, and transport when greener, friendlier methods have been identified.
  • Innovation Theft
    Stealing your competitors innovation and calling it your own.
  • Online Misbehavior
    Misrepresenting yourself and your capabilities on your website, in electronic negotiations, in electronic marketplaces, and anywhere else in the virtual world created by the internet.
  • Transportation Recklessness
    Use of highly expensive, environmentally damaging, and resource-intensive fuels to ship functionless trinkets and knick-knacks halfway around the globe or to travel halfway around the world to play golf with your counterpart at a supplier.
  • FTZ and STZ exploitation
    Regularly shifting your base of operations to take advantage of Free Trade Zones and Secure Trade Zones to avoid paying taxes and your debt to society.
  • Bribery
    Bribing public officials to change the laws to your corporate advantage … be it a reduction in environmental regulations, a reduction in safety regulations, or a reduction in social welfare and employment regulations to increase corporate profits at society’s expense.

The Splendors of Scrap

Is it just me, or has the quantity and quality of sourcing and supply-chain related articles on Industry Week significantly increased in the first quarter of this year? I just stumbled upon another great article titled “Table Scraps” that noted that enterprising thieves have figured out that scrap means money, so why does the concept still elude some manufacturers?

The article quotes Mark Ripple of BBk Ltd. that notes that Most of the time, depending on what material you’re using, some plastics can be reground and reused, and some metal can be remelted or sent back to scrap metal suppliers … but a lot of suppliers I see are still just throwing away the bulk in a dumpster.” With some metals now commanding over $2,000 an ounce (like platinum), why would anyone waste even a gram (when it would be worth over $71)?

Supposedly, the scrap is disposed either because it’s not economical to re-use it, it’s not in a reusable form, or it’s just not part of the company’s culture. So what? Sell it to someone else who can reuse it or melt it down. If there are thieves willing to raid construction sites on what seems like an almost nightly basis, or gut unguarded vacant homes for metals – there’s obviously someone willing to pay a pretty two-penny for it. (By the way, a 211 year-old British two-penny coin in very good condition would net you over $30 on e-bay.)

The fact of the matter is that scrap sales can be worth tens of millions of dollars for a large manufacturer. The article notes that Shaw Industries, who made it part of their sustainable business model eight years ago, has recovered tens of millions of dollars just on waste-brokering activities. And on the off-chance the scrap you have really is waste, you could still create a waste-to-energy facility and, if it was based on vaporization, sell the slag that is created as a by-product. There’s just no excuse for waste.

This makes me wonder when government is going to catch on and enforce mandatory recycling of all recyclable materials. Over 90% of materials that is currently ending up in landfills is easily recyclable, but is not recycled because no government wants to be the one further contributing to today’s deficit by building a 9 or 10 digit recycling facility – even though they’d make money hand over fist reselling the materials to local, and global, manufacturers. Where I live, only about half of the plastic and metal containers that pass through an average household WITH recycling grades are allowed to be included in the weekly recycling pickup. Stupid. If the state or province where you live doesn’t have a facility, it should still collect them, compact them, and ship them to the neighboring state with an appropriate plant. Now I know the transportation would contribute to greenhouse emissions, but, unless you were shipping all the way across the continent, not nearly as much as the initial refinement and initial creation of some of these metals and plastics in the first place.

This also makes me wonder why we have junkyards for cars. I know the standard response is because North America doesn’t have an equivalent of the European ELV, but considering how much the metals in those wrecks are worth today, if I were a junkyard owner, I’d be hiring summer students with lots of aggression to work out (while they were waiting for the next sports season to begin) to break them down and then sell the scrap on the global market. But then again, I’m always trying to think logically and rationally and efficiently about problems …

Exploring EcoVadis

Last month, Jason Busch gave the sourcing world an introduction to EcoVadis in his two part series (Part I and Part II) over on Spend Matters.

In his posts, he noted that EcoVadis was a European (and, in particular, a French) provider of a sustainability solution for evaluating and monitoring suppliers whose primary focus is helping European companies meet emerging green and sustainability regulatory requirements. According to Jason, not only does EcoVadis monitor environmental and operational practices, but they also consider labor practices & human rights, fair business practices, customer and product responsibility, and sustainable procurement. This is important because, in the EU, there are country-specific laws that require green and sustainability efforts.

Jason also notes that not only does EcoVadis provide capability with respect to supplier assessments, supplier audits, and corrective action procedures, but that they are also compliant with GRI G3 standards and the pending ISO 26000 certification with respect to the 150 procurement categories they are currently supporting across 23 green/sustainable criteria (and the 1200 plus pre-defined questions at a user’s disposal).

In this post, I’m supposed to be tackling the technology underpinnings of the solution, but the fact of the matter is that the technology underlying the platform is quite basic – which it should be when you consider the goal. The goal is to give a procurement buyer a quick overview of the sustainability status of a supplier on a single screen while also giving the buyer the ability to drill down deep into the rating and understand where the supplier is strong and where they are weak from a sustainability perspective.

All you need is a “dashboard” that shows a snapshot rating of a supplier on each of the key categories with the ability to drill down (which is key, because, otherwise, a “dashboard” is useless) into scorecards for each rating to find out why the score was high, low, or zero and linkages to relevant audits, alerts, and reports that led to the scores. In addition to this, EcoVadis offers a 360-degree watch that aggregates human-reviewed news articles relevant to the suppliers and their sustainability ratings, benchmarks against other suppliers in the industry on the relevant sustainability categories, and highlight summaries of each supplier. With regards to the solution they are trying to offer, the only critical component missing is an administrative interface where the head of CSR can add additional questions specific to the company and category in question (as some companies will want to go above and beyond the regulations and others will have special needs). The solution, which is multi-linqual, has the ability to add specific questions by category and customer – they just haven’t coded a web-accessible user interface yet (as most of their early customers have been more than content with the extensive question sets built into the product).

The big advantage of a standard web-based solution such as Ecovadis is the fact that suppliers only have to answer a question once and the result of an audit can be shared across multiple clients. One of the biggest downsides to wide-spread sustainability initiatives is the severe burden they place on a supplier. Think about it – not only is it resource constraining for a supplier to answer essentially the same questionnaire from each of its customers, and undergo multiple audits on the same indicators (when one surprise audit every couple of quarters should be more than enough), but it is resource crippling to have to answer the same set of questions for every potential customer, knowing that you’re only going to win a percentage of the RFPs you answer. A supplier should be able to answer the questions once, go through the (surprise) audit once, and then not worry about it for at least a couple of quarters.

It’s Time for a Power Shift

Industry Week recently ran an interesting article on “How to Produce More for Less” that noted that not only is overall manufacturing the largest end user of energy in the United States, but process manufacturers are the top five industrial energy consumers with chemical manufacturing (3.769 Trillion BTUs), petroleum refining (3.086 Trillion BTUs), pulp and paper (2.361 Trillion BTUs), iron and steel (1.455 Trillion BTUs), and food manufacturing (1.116 Trillion BTUs) leading the pack. With energy prices skyrocketing across the board, process manufacturers are feeling the burn more than ever. For example, for every dollar that natural gas increases per mmBTU, Wise Alloys, a producer of aluminum sheet coils, pays an additional $4 Million per year in energy costs.

With power costs soaring, manufacturers now have to explore every avenue they can to cut energy costs. Some are even going beyond the traditional avenues of wind power, solar power, and water power. For example, some food and beverage manufacturers have purchased fuel cells, some of which run on feed-stock, to meet some of their energy needs. Others are implementing energy saving measures by using alternate energy sources (such as solar) during peak periods, streamlining energy needs, and even diverting energy consuming processes to off-peak hours when dynamic rates are lower.

Anheuser-Busch has expanded its beer-to-waste energy program, known as its Bio-Energy Recovery System (BERS), that turns wastewater into fuel. It transports liquid waste to holding tanks where the liquid is treated using anaerobic organisms that eat the material and produce bio-gas, which is then used to fire boilers, that create steam – which is another form of power that can be easily created in any process that produces heat. Not only does the process create energy and lower energy costs, but it also saves the company between 6M and 8M annually in sewer charges since output is reduced and the water that is output is purified.

Another option, which is also being investigated by Anheuser-Busch, is alternative renewable fuels such as wood, spent grain, and landfill gas. And companies that user boilers can often reduce energy needs simply by using water softeners. Wise alloys noticed that the regional water supply to one of its plants had high levels of iron and salt. Simply adding water softeners reduced energy needs by 10%.

Manufacturing industries are ten of the eleven largest energy consumers in the US, with the top 10 industries consuming over 13.566 Quadrillion BTUs of energy annually – a rate unsustainable with current petroleum and gas reserves and current prices. It’s time for a shift – to renewable energy sources and more efficient processes that reuse waste – and waste energy.