WC Archive

It's a simple statement: waste=inefficiency=higher cost=lower profit. But until recently, many industries ended up throwing away thousands of tons of waste from production every year, filling landfills and all too often leaching toxic materials into the ground. But product manufacturers are beginning to see the value of reducing, reusing and recycling waste materials, with occasionally dramatic results.

Wired News profiles numerous companies that have taken active measures to reduce the amount of waste going to landfills. Many of the companies report reuse and recycling rates of 80-90 percent; in some cases, such as the Subaru factory in Lafayette, Indiana, efforts have led to effectively zero waste output, as nearly all leftover materials can be reused, and the small fraction that cannot is in turn used in an incinerator for electricity generation. But the most interesting example is the Georgia carpet manufacturer that found that ground up carpet pieces make a good backing for new carpets, and started a recycling program to take advantage of material that would otherwise have gone to landfill (the spokesperson for the company claims that carpet makes up a significant part of industrial trash in landfills).

This is a good indicator of the value of the high-efficiency mindset: waste goes from being not worth the trouble to care about to being not worth the trouble to make in the first place.