Exel, the North American leader in supply chain management and a Deutsche Post DHL company, was a key partner in the DuPont Building Innovations Drive to Zero landfill program. Earlier this year, Exel’s Lockport, NY, facility was acknowledged for its role in the Drive to Zero landfill program, which was honored with a 2011 DuPont Sustainable Growth Excellence Award for making a significant contribution to the sustainable growth mission of DuPont.
Drive to Zero was recognized for achieving its goal of reducing DuPont Building Innovations’ environmental footprint from 81 million pounds of landfill waste annually to zero in only three years.
The DuPont Buffalo facility in Lockport, NY, was among 15 manufacturing and third-party partner sites worldwide that participated in Drive to Zero. Using free tracking tools provided by the EPA, the Lockport team determined that, even after implementing many recycling procedures, it was still left with two waste streams: a small amount of unrecyclable garbage and unsellable fragments of DuPont™ Corian® solid surface material.
For Drive to Zero, Exel and DuPont collaborated to eliminate this remaining waste, arriving at a solution to:
- Engage a company to grind grade B Corian® solid surface countertops into a saleable product used in road aggregate, thereby reusing finished goods waste;
- Compost food waste and utilize the compost to fertilize trees on the property; and
- Ship the last remaining waste to a nearby energy-from-waste facility, where it is incinerated and turned into energy to power the electrical grid.
Exel’s Lockport site reached zero landfill status in August 2011, well ahead of schedule. This was a result of the site’s prior efforts to recycle waste.
“Sustainability has been a hallmark of this facility for nearly a decade,” said John Ruth, Exel’s general manager at the Lockport distribution center. “Lockport was a pilot site for the Deutsche Post DHL GoGreen climate protection program in 2004. At that time, we also became a partner in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) WasteWise program to identify and measure all the waste produced at our site.”
In addition to participating in the award-winning Drive to Zero program, Exel’s Lockport facility was recognized by the EPA with a WasteWise honorable mention for waste reduction and recycling in 2008, and was named WasteWise Endorser of the Year in 2009. The site also received the Deutsche Post DHL 2011 CEO Award for the Americas in the category “Living Responsibility” for supporting the organization’s GoGreen program.
In a company news release announcing its achievement of zero waste, DuPont Building Innovations’ president Timothy P. McCann stated, “The Drive to Zero landfill program is good for our business, good for the environment and highly valued by our customers. Working with our supply chain partners to tackle the zero landfill goal was critical to the success of our business in reducing its environmental footprint. Collaborating with our business partners allowed us to succeed in reaching our ambitious project goal of zero landfill.”
For more information, please visit www.exel.com.