The Never-Ending Story of Waste Reduction at Toyota, Part 2

"Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America (TEMA) has performed an impressive number of projects to eliminate waste. As part of a discussion of how the company has reduced waste to and beyond zero landfill, Kevin Butt, TEMA general manager and chief environmental officer, offered examples of waste-reduction projects in plants across North America.

Toyota’s Georgetown, Kentucky, plant has the capacity for 525,000 units a year. It has 7,000 employees and seven cafeterias. All of the organic waste from the cafeterias, including the oils and greases, as well as the paper and other waste from the offices, is composted. “We have a five-ton composter on-site,” states Butt. The result is a high-quality compost that is used for landscaping around the plant, in the greenhouse where the (manufacturing) plant grows its own (living) plants for landscaping, and in a six-acre garden where team members grow vegetables. Once the vegetables are harvested, 80% of them are donated to a local food bank that provides food to low-income residents. The other 20% are used in the plant's cafeterias.

The San Antonio, Texas, plant reduced the amount of waste generated from paint sludge. Previously, the sludge had a high water content and was held in a roll-off container prior to being transported and disposed of off-site. Team members came up with a way to replace the existing roll-off container with a dewatering box that uses a filter frame and cloth liner. This allows the water to drain from the sludge at the bottom of the container. Team members then pump the water into a separate container and send it for standard wastewater treatment. The new process reduces the weight of the sludge by 28 percent. In addition, the sludge is now suitable to be recycled as a base material for a local cement company.

The Cambridge, Ontario, plant has achieved the zero-landfill target for the past five years. One of its keys to success has been to maximize the number of waste streams in that plant that can be recycled. Initially, team members categorized all of the waste streams (eg: paper, batteries, sandpaper, oily rags, rubber gloves, etc.), so they could better understand where and how waste was being generated. Once the waste was categorized, the team members determined which streams could be recycled or reused. They then developed a number of tools, such as color-coded waste bins and signs, to improve the segregation of these wastes into appropriate bins. The plant now has 45 different recycling categories.

Toyota's engine plant in Buffalo, West Virginia, generates hundreds of thousands of gallons of coolant wastewater as a result of its processes. In the past, the plant had to send the oily wastewater out in two tanker trucks per day. Now the plant has installed a sequencing batch reactor (SBR) to treat the oily wastewater. The system uses bacteria to eat away at the oil in the coolant. The plant is now able to pretreat and discharge the water to a public treatment facility, which allows the water to safely be returned to the environment along with treated wastewater from the rest of the town.

The Buffalo, West Virginia, plant also sends some of its discarded plastics to a local recycling company that supports programs for the disabled. The company turns the waste plastic into flying disks (similar to Frisbees). The Toyota plant then purchases the flying disks to hand out at local community events. It also hands them out to the students of local schools who visit the plant. Then, as part of its educational program, team members provide an explanation of how the recycling process works at the plant, using the flying disks as an example. Some of the other discarded plastics at the plant are sent to a recycling center that uses them to make guardrails for roadways.

When the Huntsville, Alabama, plant needed to shut down an engine production line, instead of viewing all of the materials from the old line as waste that needed to be discarded, team members looked for ways to reuse and recycle as much as possible. For example, they found 30,000 gallons of coolant from the central systems on the old line that, it turned out, was compatible with an existing line in another part of the plant. The team members siphoned the coolant into containers and transported it to the other line.

Toyota's plant in Indiana installed a paper pulper in 2009 to recycle paper products from the cafeteria. In 2010, it expanded the recycling program to paper products from the plant's bathrooms and break rooms. The pulper shreds the paper products and mixes them with water to form a slurry. Most of the water is then removed and reused by the pulper. The pulp is then sold to a paper recycling facility to make paperboard and cardboard boxes. In the past three years, almost 500,000 pounds of paper have gone through the pulper.

Company-wide, TEMA's plants used an immersion (dip) process to apply corrosion inhibitor to the vehicles. In order to cover all of the interior crevices, an excessive amount of corrosion inhibitor was required. Toyota worked with one of its suppliers to develop an electro-deposition process that uses less corrosion inhibitor to achieve same level of coating."

 

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