GM Turns Waste Into Millions

General Motors has found a way to have success in transforming unwanted materials into millions of dollars padding its bottom line. The unwanted materials, also called waste, exist out about everything, from discarded wood pallets to used oil.

The American company has announced that its Baltimore manufacturing plant is the company's eighth facility to achieve landfill-free status.

General Motors looked at all the sources of waste at the plant and noticed a waste hierarchy. So GM started first looking where they could eliminate waste production, and second preventing the waste, then recycling and reusing waste. The last resort is disposal, and a goal of GM is to have no disposal.

The biggest obstacle was the mindset that it's fairly inexpensive to landfill waste. So GM had to look at it from a standpoint that they don't want to impact the environment at all, in terms of this waste. General Motors has made principals, and one of those is that they are committed to reducing waste and pollutants, conserving resources and recycling materials at every stage of the product life cycle. These principals have kind of set the benchmark for the way that GM does business.

Due to this way of thinking, recycling and reusing, GM has managed to bring the cost for the waste management back from 32 million to 8 million dollars.
And for the future the goals are to have 20 percent of all their manufacturing facilities landfill free, for the moment they only 8 plants are landfill free.

Dimitri Delbeke
Source: GreenBiz.com