Chassis builder achieves zero waste to landfill using reusable packaging

Landfill’s best customer becomes environmental champion

October 1, 2010

Freightliner Custom Chassis Corp. (FCCC), Gaffney, S.C., was the local landfill’s best customer, hauling two truckloads "slam-packed full" of trash per day.

Used to be, Freightliner Custom Chassis Corp. (FCCC), Gaffney, S.C., was the local landfill’s best customer, hauling two truckloads “slam-packed full” of trash per day. Used to be.

Today the nation’s largest producer of diesel-powered chassis for the walk-in delivery van, commercial bus, school bus and recreational vehicle (RV) industries and the nation’s largest alternative-energy-powered chassis builder no longer dumps any waste in the landfill.

That’s zero. Zip. Nothing. A great big goose egg. The manufacturer dumped its last load in a landfill on Sept. 16, 2009.

Drivers

FCCC is a 500-employee Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA) company. In 2004, as part of the company’s environmental and manufacturing stewardship, DTNA implemented ISO 14001. A significant component of ISO 14001 is pollution prevention.

Roger Nielsen, Daimler Trucks North America chief operating officer, said, “And within that is the requirement for continuous improvement. Where do you want to end up? The ultimate in continuous improvement on the environmental side is to become waste-free. So it was just the natural progression of being ISO 14001-certified.

The zero-waste-to-landfill initiative picked up steam in September 2007, a manifestation of parent company Daimler AG’s motto, “Shaping Future Transportation,” which declared its position it as a world transportation leader driving “sustainable mobility.”

FCCC’s zero-waste-to-landfill program is a pilot for all eight of DTNA’s manufacturing facilities, as well as other Daimler AG companies, including Mercedes-Benz, Western Star, Thomas Built Buses, Mitsubishi Fuso, and Smart.

Align Product Sustainability With Operations. In addition, as the nation’s largest producer of alternative-fuel-powered chassis—offering hybrid electric (HEV), hydraulic hybrid (HHV), the recently announced all electric (EV), compressed natural gas (CNG), and liquid propane (LPG) for delivery vans, school buses, recreational vehicles, and commercial bus applications.

FCCC wanted to align its manufacturing operations with the environmental objectives of its alternative-fuel-powered products.

“We’re trying to build an environmental consciousness—not just on the vehicle side, but also on the factory side,” Nielsen explained. “Not only are we producing green vehicles, we are a green manufacturer.”

Customer-driven. Furthermore, FCCC’s customers, which include companies like FedEx and UPS, wanted to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and fuel consumption. “Our focus on green is also very much customer- driven,” said Freightliner Custom Chassis Corp. President Bob Harbin.

“Customers in the package delivery business are very conscious that they’re big consumers of fossil fuels and they very much want to reduce that. This initiative ties in extremely well with that whole part of the environmental story. UPS and FedEx have realized over a 40 percent fuel economy improvement with FCCC’s hybrid electric and CNG alternative-fuel-chassis technology.

“We also sell to a lot of laundry companies,” Harbin said. “One customer has 250 laundries around the U.S., and they also are looking at what we’re doing from a waste standpoint and how they can apply that to their facilities—reducing waste in general. It creates a nice conversation with all of our corporate and retail customers.

“We’ve been in alt-fuel vehicles for a long time. Our customers look upstream to their suppliers and say, ‘What are you doing?’ Yes, we have alt-fuel vehicles but beyond that, we are manufacturing them in an environmentally responsible manner. It fits right in with our mutual strategies.”

The next, natural progression for the vehicles was the development of FCCC’s all-electric walk-in van chassis. Introduced in March of this year, the vehicle goes into production during the first half of 2011.

Daimler took a small equity position in Tesla, the upstart automaker of the electric, racy Roadster, now Tesla is providing the batteries for Daimler’s electric Smart® car. “We’re using those same batteries in our all-electric delivery van. So the whole Daimler circle comes together,” Nielsen said.

Landfill Costs, Closings. Under fire for accepting millions of tons of out-of-state waste in the state’s landfills, South Carolina imposed a moratorium on new landfills in 2009.

“So we were faced with the looming issue of having to truck our trash to Georgia, which would mean a significant cost,” Harbin said.

“We saw restrictions on landfills. Landfills are going to fill up,” Nielsen said. “You’re always going to have increasing landfill and waste disposal costs. Recognizing that companies are no longer going to be allowed to dispose of tons and tons of waste at will, we viewed this as an opportunity to get ahead of the curve.”

Nielsen added, “Our company’s main headquarters are in Portland, Ore., where we also have a truck manufacturing plant, and the trash there is hauled almost 300 miles one way to a landfill in eastern Oregon that can be seen from space. Aside from the environmental implications, that 600-mile round trip adds expense.” “What we’ve found out with FCCC is that zero waste to landfill is cost-neutral.”

New Landfill/Waste Facility. The broader issue of landfills and solid waste handling came front and center in 2008, just prior to the moratorium on new landfills, when a waste management company petitioned to locate a waste processing center in Cherokee County. Although the proposed center was to include recycling, a methane gas-to-energy system, and no hazardous waste, it would also include a 75- to 350-acre landfill. Some of the waste could come from northern-border state North Carolina.

An uproar arose in the community. Lawn signs popped up: “No Landfill”; those anxious for the economic benefits staked “Landfill, Yes.” “It split the community in half,” said Bill Harris, environmental/facilities engineering supervisor at FCCC.

For Harris and other Freightliner employees, it became personal (see Figure 1). The idea that their hometown could become the dumping ground for waste from another state crossed the T and dotted the I in their commitment to a zero-waste-to-landfill program. By not needing to deposit any waste in any landfill, the manufacturer would no longer be part of the landfill waste stream, Harris said. “We here at FCCC took ourselves out of the conversation.” Harris added.

Freightliner Custom Chassis Selected

Nielsen asked Sandra Carter, DTNA’s environmental engineering manager, to identify an affiliate company that would be willing and able to be the pilot program for other DTNA companies. Already recycling about 70 percent, Freightliner Custom Chassis was a natural for selection as the pilot.

The pilot program approach offered DTNA the opportunity to evaluate potential setbacks and test solutions prior to implementation at other locations. “Waste to landfill is the measurement for making the right decisions regarding processes and disposal alternatives. We do not want to be zero waste to landfill at further expense to other natural resources. The alternative solutions for our waste have to make complete ecological sense,” Carter said.

“Sandra walked in one day and said, ‘Hey, we have an idea; we’d like you to try something,’ Harbin said.

“We challenged these guys,” Nielsen said. “If we go landfill-free, it might cost us a little to do this, but it also makes sense because in the future, we won’t have to face the problems.”

Harbin responded positively. “Did I have any clue how to do it at that point? No. Absolutely not,” Harbin said.“Fortunately, we have two guys here who are full of energy, enthusiasm, and passion, and they just took over.”

The “two guys” are Harris and Ryan Pennington, environmental/facilities support tech. “This is something we wanted to do–not just because corporate told us to, but because it’s the right thing to do for the organization and our community. Ryan and I took personal ownership of it,” Harris said. “Bob is very talented at empowering people to let them do what they need to do to get their jobs done,” Carter said.

Evaluation, Models

Rated Impact. “The way the ISO 14001 system works, you rank all of your environmental impacts,” Carter said. “You identify the frequency, cost, quantity, the regulatory and environmental impact, and your stakeholders’ concerns and you rank them according to the criteria to establish your priority.

“And here, because the landfill is going to close, and of course regulations have been increasing, stakeholder concern for waste management is high. And that’s how we chose the zero-waste-to-landfill initiative,” Carter said.

Joined Organizations. First Pennington and Harris joined the EPA’s WasteWise program in November 2007. “The program is founded on the 10 Steps to Reduce Waste,” Harris said (see EPA’s 10 Steps to Reduce Waste sidebar). “It also provides a network for practice-sharing and recycling alternatives.”

“I know the South has gotten a bad rap, historically, for our environmental consciousness,” Harris continued. “But the state of South Carolina has good environmental assistance and stewardship programs, such as the Center for Waste Minimization, Environmental Excellence Program, and SmartBusiness Recycling.”

Harris called the various program coordinators “absolutely fabulous.” He said, “Stacey Washington—I wish I could clone her. On her initial visit she did a waste assessment with us and she was Dumpster Diving. You don’t find many people willing to jump into the trash with you.

“She came from the ranks of inspector, so she had a high level of working knowledge of how a facility should be maintained, and she kind of laid it out for us,” Harris said. A follow-up report outlined the steps she recommended that they take, along with a list of resources.

Evaluated Waste Stream. The dumpster-diving exercise entailed a visit to the landfill transfer station, while the company’s waste load was being dumped onto a concrete pad to observe what the load actually contained.

“Making people uncomfortable and making their problems visible—that really is the first step to moving forward,” Carter said.

“That first visit to the landfill, we realized what we thought we were doing right wasn’t being done,” Pennington said.

“It was a big surprise. It was like, ‘Oh, I thought we were recycling cardboard,’” Carter said.

“Our minimal recycling efforts were not being sustained across the board. We were recycling a lot of wood pallets, but we were throwing our odd pieces of wood in a waste compactor, and that went to the landfill,” Harris said. “So to say we recycled wood, we needed to make it all-inclusive.”

Visited Other Facilities. Next Harris and Pennington visited the Subaru automotive assembly plant in Indiana in 2008 to observe its zero-waste-to-landfill program.

“We went to Subaru thinking, ‘Oh, they’re untouchable.’ When we came out of there, we looked at each other and said, ‘We can do this. We’re not that far behind them,’” Harris said.

How They Accomplished “Zero”

So how did a chassis manufacturing facility with numerous parts perform a disappearing act of waste of this scale? It reduced the waste it generated with reusable packaging and product redesigns; and found recycling recipients for all of its remaining solid waste.

1. Formed employee Green Team. “From the beginning we recognized the importance of teamwork to successfully reach our target,” Harbin said. “In order to change the environmental ideology at our facility, we knew that we must first change the awareness levels of our work force..

“Involvement of the employees on both a personal and team level has served FCCC well along its journey toward TOS [DTNA’s lean manufacturing system, Truck Operating System] excellence. Why couldn’t we apply the same principles of employee involvement and continuous improvement to change our workplace culture to one that promotes environmental responsibility?”

“Ryan spearheaded the whole zero-waste-to-landfill program as far as on the plant floor level,” Harris said. “He was instrumental in bringing about that culture change that was really why we were successful.” (see Employee Buy-in sidebar).

Pennington formed a Green Team from all areas of the plant—salaried employees and hourly employees—in the first three months of the program. He grew the Green Team from 20 to about 50 in the following two years—about 10 percent of the work force.

2. Established pilot area. “You can’t change the whole plant at one time. You’ve got to get the bugs worked out on a small scale first,” Pennington said.

The plant has three production lines: Line 1 is for school bus chassis; Line 2 for the RV and commercial bus chassis; and Line 3 is the walk-in van chassis line. The school bus line is exclusively for affiliate company Thomas Built Buses. Pennington and Harris selected production teams 401 and 402 on the school bus chassis line as the pilot line to test the program (see Figure 2).

3. Analyzed waste stream. “We actually dug through the trash and did waste stream analysis, and measured how much we had of which material coming from each area [see Figure 3]. We realized those two areas basically had all waste streams—wood, nylon, plastic, rubber,” Pennington said. We knew that this would be a good location to start. It would give us the ability to look at all the waste streams.”

“This was also one of the toughest areas in the plant to work,” Harris said. ‘It’s pretty hard work. It’s a pretty tough group. We figured, ‘If you could sell it to them, you could sell ribs to a woman in white gloves. If we could succeed there, we could succeed anywhere …’ That’s why we dove off that cliff,” Harris said.

“Starting with the pilot line, we looked at every waste stream coming out of that area and how we handled it from the time it became waste until it left this facility,” Pennington said. “We were able to work out those speed bumps and work around them, through them, eliminate them.

“We had a team member from each line come in to help as a pilot area Green Team member,” Pennington continued. “Once we had those two teams onboard, we could see, ‘Hey, this is going to work; this is going to be sustainable,’ and we just copied and pasted it throughout the plant. And now we’re doing it corporatewide.”

Harris added, “And then as we rolled it out to the other lines, they were sharing their successes with the other employees. So that in essence was the evolution of our environmental responsibility that led to behavioral pattern changes of individual employees taking ownership of how we manage the waste in this facility.”

4. Sorted, collected for recycling. The first step was to recycle the waste (see Figure 4). “When we first jumped into this fire, we had to deal with what we had. That was to recycle all that we could immediately,” Harris said. “Even more so, to recycle what we claimed to already. That took us from the lower 70 percentile to the upper 80 percentile right there—just doing what we claimed to do. So we had a big jump in our landfill waste-free percentage in the first few months.”

Based on the waste stream analysis, Pennington and Harris implemented a color-coding system with each color container corresponding to each material waste type. They posted the system on a clearly visible color chart. Developing a standardized method to identify different waste streams at the point of use allowed them to segregate themwaste easily, without additional effort from employees, through visual management.

“The color-coding process makes the standard so easily recognizable. It doesn’t matter where you go within Daimler Trucks NA. It’s still the same foundation,” Pennington said.

The team tailored the program for FCCC’s operations. “That’s where the Green Team came in,” Harris said. “One size doesn’t necessarily fit all. We allowed the individual teams to customize what we were asking them to do to fit their area.”

Sorting some materials increased recoupment payments, Nielsen said. “We were putting all of our metal in one bin. Well, we now segregate all of our metal—aluminum, brass, stainless steel, carbon steel,” he said.

5. Found waste destinations. “Then Bill and I got to work, piece by piece, breaking down our waste stream and finding destinations for it,” Pennington said. “We broker our recycled materials ourselves.”

Carter said, “There are some tricky waste streams that you run across and you go, ‘Oooh, how are we going to do this?’”

Harris added, “Ninety-three to 95 percent is when we started gnashing teeth, when we got to things that we didn’t have a good action plan for.”

“Our three toughest waste streams were plastics, rubber, and organics,” Pennington said. “In South Carolina, you can’t send organics for composting off your property. Right across the street, Gaffney High School has a great horticulture club that would love to have the organics to use as compost. But it’s against the law to actually send it to them.

“We don’t have anywhere here on our site where we can efficiently compost it, and the small stuff like that is really hard to source out. So, now it’s ground up into mulch compound,” Pennington added.

“Rubber hose, that’s another thing, because it’s not a valuable recyclable, like nylon,” Pennington said. “The South Carolina Center for Waste Minimization got us in touch with a rubber recycler here within our state, not far from us. He makes playground mulch out of the rubber hose.

“We don’t generate a lot of it; we’ll send it out only two or three times a year, but it’s heavy enough where it would make a significant impact in a landfill. We call this recycler and within a day or two, he’s up here, picks it up, and there’s no charge,” Pennington said.

“It goes back to what I said earlier about Stacey,” Harris said. “We can call her and say, ‘OK, who are the good ones? Where can we get the best deal with our recyclables?’ So having those kinds of resources within our home state, that’s how we finished ahead of schedule—that and having the Green Team.”

“When we first recycled plastics, it really wasn’t that hard,” Pennington said.

“It was a little hiccup, but it wasn’t that difficult at the time because there was a high demand for a lot of different kinds of plastics,” Harris said. “Now, the demand is less for many plastics, and we are constantly feeling out the market for which plastics have a value right now, and recyclers only want that type of plastic.”

Carter said, “The sorting of plastics is one of the trickiest things, because there are so many different kinds.”

Harris said, “There are waste streams and substreams of that they want you to clean, sort.”

The company has its plastics sorted and stored at a local vocational rehabilitation center that is a state sponsored training center employing individuals who have been absent from the workplace and are training for return to full-time positions. “It is a very cost-effective way,” Harris said.

Pennington goes online to search for recipients for plastics. “The big problem I found is that we’re a small generator,” he said.

Regardless, every last bit of waste finds a home.

“In our paint processes, we filter out paint waste. These used filters have a BTU value similar to that of coal. We’ve been sending our paint booth filter media to a co-generation facility in Alabama for over a year and the waste ash then goes into a cement kiln,” Carter said.

“Absolute zero is where we want to go; we don’t ever want somebody to accuse us of cheating,” said Nielsen. “So that little bit we have to burn, like the paint solids, we’re mixing with coal to make cement. Even the ash doesn’t get thrown away. It is rolled into the cement. So there’s nothing left.”

“These guys took the challenge and said, “Let’s make this pay for itself,” and they’ve done a good job in doing just that. . We’re not necessarily trying to make money on recyclables, but it’s nice that the program is self-sustaining,” Nielsen said.

6. Used reusable containers. “The river’s gotten low; now we’re seeing rocks and pebbles at the bottom that we can target and actually start reducing a lot of waste,” Harbin said.

“So we started looking at the things that we could eliminate packaging from, one commodity at a time,” Harris said.

Nielsen said, “We looked around at this marketplace that’s always trying to come up with a cost-efficient vehicle, and we asked suppliers how we could we reduce our material usage, and they said, ‘The easy thing is, quit packing them in cardboard and Styrofoam®.’ So you start taking out materials—and their costs.

“We were a heavy user of disposable wooden pallets. You think ‘wood is biodegradable; we should be able to throw these away.’ But then you get landfills saying that in one, two, three years, they’ll no longer accept wooden pallets.

“So that puts you into the returnable container program,” Nielsen continued. “We tried to do the very simple thing, which was to make returnable pallets, but they would disappear and they were expensive. So now we’ve gone to containers we make from recyclable materials.”

“We actually build blue reusable racks here out of preformed tubing,” Harris said. “This allows us to do small lot containerization. We used to have just tons of these cardboard boxes around the plant. Now they’re the exception. Less than 10 percent of the components are packed in cardboard. It used to be 90 percent. We’re eliminating it month by month.”

Harris said the company is working hard to convert its recycling to reducing and reusing. “The end vision is that we don’t want to recycle. We want to reduce and reuse, then recycle,” he said. “So by taking packaging out of the picture, we don’t have to deal with it. We don’t have to recycle the cardboard because in this process, cardboard doesn’t exist anymore. We don’t have to deal with Stryrofoam inserts or metal straps.”

The reusable racking is used for all of the kanban supplies and larger components for such as radiators, transmissions, and exhausts.

“These after-treatment devices—they’re part of the exhaust system—used to come in big cardboard boxes. Now they go into the returnable containers,” Pennington said.

Radiators are built and customized on-site. Instead of having the radiators components come in on one giant wooden pallet packed in cardboard and Styrofoam inserts, they now come in returnable containers. They continuously go back and forth to the radiator component suppliers (see Figure 6).

“The container system simplifies assembly also, because it eliminates workers having to manipulate them to build them up and hook them to the hoist,” Pennington said. “They’re set up, ready to go in these carts, line set. So they can pull them out, ready for use. Now, we can build them right here in the rack.”

Freightliner builds pipe racks for the exhaust components. They also used to come stacked in cardboard boxes. “Now we’ve got different types of pipe racks for the different parts we build,” Pennington said.

Some pretty intense discussions were involved in figuring out how to reuse t walk-in van chassis control supports. “We had several meetings. The logistics of it was tough,” Harris said. “We had to take into account that we were introducing already used parts back into the inventory system. We also had to accurately track the inventory, and make sure the customer would get those back to us at regular intervals.”

“We also had to do a cost-justification to show how we were offsetting shipping costs. We were having to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year just on that one part we were using once and only getting scrap value out of. Now that $50 can be reused, on average, five to seven times,” Harris said.

“We had a couple, three different tries before we got the school bus exhaust container system right,” he continued. “School bus exhausts are extremely long, so returnable racking for them was different than anything else” (see Figure 7).

“We had to design some unique racks to accommodate exhaust pipes. And then they weren’t tuggable. So we had to modify them in our maintenance shops to allow us to use tugger transport. That one wasn’t easy. But you know, you learn,” Harris said.

“The racks have been built so they can be transported on a tugger train system instead of a forklift,” Pennington said. “We tug just about everything with battery power now. It’s more energy-efficient and it lowers carbon emissions. And instead of one pallet per forklift, we’re able to tug three or four of them at a time.”

7. Reduced waste with redesign.

The Green Team began looking further upstream at the design stage for ways to reduce waste before it was generated (see Figure 8). The idea for redesigning a manufacturing process to eliminate tubing waste came from a line worker, Tammy Littlejohn.

“Tammy works on the line where they drop the fuel assembly realized that the upstream line cuts this rubber hose long and she was cutting another 4 feet off it.”

“It was just something as simple as where our assemblers cut the lines when they install them. Historically they were leaving 6 to 10 ft. of tubing for every chassis as waste.”

“She just took that thought straight to the supervisor on her line and said, ‘Why are we cutting off extra pieces of the vinyl tubing and recycling it? Why give me a 12-ft. hose, when I only need 6 ft. 2 in.?’

“After measuring and analyzing them, we went to the team members and said, ‘Listen, when you pull a fuel line, pull it to here. It doesn’t need to go any further.’ They changed that in their standard operating procedure. Now the waste went from several feet per chassis to no more than a couple inches.

“It was $84,000 cost reduction in nylon hose waste. And that’s just one color of hose,” Pennington said.

Another redesign involved input from a customer. “We were putting little rubber caps on a pipe for the buses,” Harris said. “The environmental engineer from Thomas Built said, ‘Hey, as soon as these pipes come through our door, we pull the caps off and throw them in the trash can.’ We walked down to the production line and realized that we don’t put them on until the last station. So that little rubber cap we were purchasing, putting on here, shipping two hours up the road, they were taking off. So we stopped doing that.

“Those are some of the finer points that we’ll continue to work on,” Harris said.

8. Analyzed, measured. Pennington said the team repeated the dumpster diving at the landfill transfer site to analyze each load’s contents and measure the program’s progress. “You’ve always got to go back, analyze, measure, improve; analyze, measure, improve. That’s something we did throughout the whole time. That’s continuous improvement,” Pennington said.

Management Support Critical

“Another secret to our success is upper management support,” Harris said. “Whenever we’ve hit a roadblock and have had to add a little gas to what we were trying to do, they’ve always been there.”

“That seems cliché, because everything you read says you have to have top management commitment, but it’s true,” Carter added. “Bob and Roger are totally in support of the program, and if they weren’t, it would not be successful.”

Awards and Rewards

Freightliner’s brag wall would make Heisman Trophy winner George Rogers envious.

In 2009 and 2010, the company won South Carolina’s Smart Business Recycling Program awards for outstanding waste reduction and recycling—in 2010, it won the top award.

FCCC has been recognized by EPA’s WasteWise Program for its waste reduction efforts.

Freightliner was the only industrial recipient this year for the state’s Earth Day award.

The company is also a proud member of the South Carolina Environmental Excellence Program, which recognizes state industries that sustain a superior environmental management system.

All of the awards are gratifying, but the crème de la crème was Daimler’s coveted 2009 Global Environmental Leadership Award. Freightliner beat out 50-plus other Daimler companies worldwide to win the award for its extraordinary efforts for the environment. The award was presented in Stuttgart, Germany, in March of this year to only three winners.

“When we went to Germany to accept the award, we noticed a huge cultural difference, because there, they’re born into environmental consciousness. It’s common there. And then you come back here and it makes you realize what we’ve done here,” Pennington said.

“What makes it so significant is that we didn’t just start a new process,” he continued. “We changed a living culture of people. People who grew up used to throwing their cigarette butts and trash out of the car window are now at the point that they have that environmentally heightened mindset and awareness.”

Not Resting on their Laurels

“There are no trash containers leaving here. We’re at zero waste to landfill, but we’re not done,” Harbin said. “Now we continue to reduce what we’re recycling.”

“If we’re reducing and reusing, then we’ve proceeded upstream, which is where we want to be. We want to cut it off as far upstream as we can,” Harris concurred.

“We have a metric for landfill-free, but we have a metric for reducing waste generation as well, because you can’t have one without the other,” Carter said. “You can look really good in landfill-free while increasing your waste.”

“You cannot run from your waste,” Nielsen said. “If you sell a building or a property, whatever you dumped in the ground while you owned it is yours forever. So we’re very conscious of the fact that that’s ours.

“Zero is absolute, there’s no waste at the end,” Nielsen said. “People ask, ‘Does zero mean everything you can get rid of?’ and we say, ‘No. Everything.’ There is no waste at the end.

“It takes some effort to do the due diligence, but at the end of the day, it’s all about ensuring that zero means zero.”

Freightliner Custom Chassis Corp., 522 Hyatt St., Gaffney, SC 29341, 864-487-1700, ryan.pennington@daimler.com, freightlinerchassis.com,

Daimler Trucks North America LLC, 4747 Channel Ave., Portland, OR 97217, 503-745-8000, www.daimler-trucksnorthamerica.com