Recycling engine plugs. Courtesy of Tom Mattingly at Subaru of Indiana Automotive

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008--

If you’re a Subaru driver looking for green car, you won’t find a hybrid, fuel cell, or diesel car in Subaru’s fleet. But at their Lafayette, Indiana auto plant, the car company is making a different kind of green car. The cars manufactured there are made in a plant that’s the first in the U.S. to achieve zero landfill status.

Zero landfill status means just what it sounds like—all the raw materials for making a car go into the plant, but almost no garbage goes out. According to Tom Easterday, Senior Vice President of Subaru of Indiana Automotive, the plant has a recycling rate of 99.8 percent and it’s been almost four years since they’ve sent a load of waste directly to a landfill. That means most families throw out more garbage than the auto plant, which makes nearly 200,000 cars a year: more than 100,000 Outbacks, Legacys, and Tribecas, plus over 90,000 Toyota Camrys, made according to a collaborative agreement with Toyota.

So what’s left over when you make a car? The single biggest source of waste is the scrap steel and aluminum from the blanking and stamping processes—cutting out the parts that fit together to make the body of the car. After that comes packaging—including wood pallets, containers made of plastic, cardboard, styrofoam, plus steel braces and paper. Then there are oils, other solvents like paint sludge, and solvent-soaked rags.

What does Subaru do with all that waste? It all boils down to an elementary school recycling lesson: reduce, reuse, and recycle. First off, the company has cut its waste almost in half since 2000, from 459 pounds of waste per car down to 251 pounds per car. A big chunk of that savings comes from making less waste when cutting out the car pieces from the blanking press, similar to cutting the most cookies from a rolled-out sheet of cookie dough. By cutting the car parts more efficiently, the plant has reduced its steel use by 47 percent since 2000. Plus, the company estimates that its CO2 emissions are down 20 percent in that time.

Less materials used means less to get rid of, and Subaru starts by re-using whatever it can. Last year, the company re-used 812 tons of wood pallets and 22 tons of oil products. One of the company’s major projects has been to re-use as much packaging as possible—so the plastic, styrofoam, steel braces, and cardboard that the car parts come in is all sent back to the suppliers to be used again. Even seemingly small things can make a big difference: this Subaru plant gets its 6-cylinder engines from Japan (it manufactures the 4-cylinder engines there) and the lines coming off the engines are capped. Re-using those plastic caps instead of throwing them away means a lot less waste when you’re talking about thousands of engines shipped in. In all, Tom Easterday says the company re-used nearly 3,000 tons of materials last year.

Once it has re-used what it can, the Indiana plant recycles nearly everything else that’s left: a whopping 99.8 percent. That remaining .2 percent, says Easterday, is hazardous or medical waste that gets incinerated by law. So how much waster does the car company recycle? Last year, for example, it recycled over 13,000 tons of steel, 1,400 tons of paper and cardboard, and nearly 200 tons of foams and plastics. Add in 20 tons of soda cans and bottles, 10 tons of solvent-soaked rags, and 4 tons of light bulbs, and in 2007 the auto plant recycled just under 15,000 tons of material.

What’s most interesting is how some of those recycled materials are used. Subaru works with a company, Allegiant Global, to create markets for its waste materials. For example, some of the styrofoam goes into bean bag chairs. And the dried paint sludge—the paint left over after the cars are spray-painted—is captured and recycled to make things like railroad ties, parking lot bumpers, and the inner padding in bicycle helmets.

Finally, the materials that can’t be recycled—Easterday says typically less than 3 percent per year—goes to nearby Covanta Indianapolis, an energy company that burns the waste to generate electricity for that city.

Easterday says credit for the company’s success in achieving zero landfill status goes to its associates, who make suggestions from the factory floor; its suppliers, who have cooperated to eliminate unnecessary packaging and switch to re-usable materials; its partnership with Allegiant Global; and its parent company, Subaru of America, which sets annual targets for reducing energy use and CO2 emissions, and encouraging more efficient practices in the plant.

Subaru of Indiana Automotive’s zero landfill plant has earned it a couple of awards from the Environmental Protection Agency, including the 2007 Gold Achievement in Industrial Material Recycling from the EPA’s Waste Wise Program. That’s impressive, but as a Subaru driver, I’m still waiting for that Outback hybrid. Tom Easterday says they’re working on it.

--Karin Vergoth

Multimedia

Image: Recycling connector protectors

Image: Recycling waste oil

Image: Recycling black and white caps

Image: Recycling aluminum chips

Image: Recycling aluminum

Image: Recycling double-sided tape backing

Sources

Tom Easterday
Senior Vice President Subaru of Indiana Automotive, Inc. Lafayette, Indiana

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