Recycling to Achieve Landfill Reduction

Until recently, I hadn't given much thought to landfills, except when I'd see the occasional picture of black bears rummaging through garbage dumps in Northern Wisconsin. 

But I've learned that they are a growing problem.  In the last 40 years, the United States has doubled the amount of waste being dumped into landfills.  On a global scale, solutions are complex, as detailed in a special report on waste in a recent issue of The Economist. 

However, I've learned that helping reduce landfill waste doesn't take much additional effort – I too can make a positive impact, and really bring home with me the things I’ve seen happening at Frito-Lay.

I had an opportunity to learn more about landfills from Reggie Nayar, who heads up Frito-Lay's efforts to reduce landfill waste at our more than 30 plants and nearly 200 distribution centers.  Last year Reggie tested a Landfill Reduction program at four plants.  Prior to the test, our plants already had waste reduction programs in place to recycle the food waste from manufacturing lines.  But in the landfill reduction pilot, they were able to reduce landfill waste by another 50 percent.  Based on the pilot’s success, the program is being expanded to other locations this year.

"During the pilot program, we found that the majority of waste produced was from food products and cardboard -- waste that could actually be sold," Reggie says.  "So we had both an economic and sustainability incentive to further reduce waste."

When Reggie visits a Frito-Lay facility, he immediately identifies an employee with a passion for recycling in their personal life, and asks them to volunteer to help lead the landfill reduction efforts at their site.  "I find that the leader's passion is contagious, and encourages other people to become aware of how easy it is.”

The power of our waste reduction programs becomes clear when we see how the sites are sharing best practices with each other.  For example, recently our Beloit, Wisc., plant hosted an Eco-Fair to explore new recycling ideas.  Beloit has done an outstanding job with the program, and their landfill waste is now only 1.75 percent of total waste from the plant.  Our other sites are learning from Beloit and hosting their own eco-activities.

So, what do we do?  Well, to start, we can take two simple actions to reduce waste.  First, ensure that 100 percent of paper products end up in recycle bins, since paper products make up almost 30 percent of the waste in landfills.  It helps if your neighborhood has an aggressive recycling program in place, like my city, Plano, Texas, does. They provide a separate disposal container for recyclable materials, which makes it incredibly easy to do at home.

Second, and this takes a little more energy, is to compost your kitchen scraps, since they account for nearly 20 percent of landfill waste and can produce harmful methane gas.  My wife Janis (pictured left with our home composter) and I have started composting ourselves.  I found good advice about food composting on EnviroMom and bought an Earth Machine composter from GREENCulture Composters, which has a number of models to choose from.

Frankly, I'm a bit nervous about composting. I’m hoping it will work, rather than attracting black bears to our yard (ok, no black bears in Plano, maybe raccoons?).  I'll keep you up to speed on our conserve and preserve progress at Frito-Lay -- landfill reduction, innovations with our packaging and a partnership with TerraCycle, to name a few, that I’ll blog about soon -- and Janis and my progress with our Earth Machine.  What are you doing to reduce landfill waste?

Comments

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1541693676]

I am new to the Recycling world and I am making it fun for my family. Can you give me any quick tips that might help me really get this ball rolling? Thank you.

[Kristin H]

We like the Planet Green Web site for info about going green -- and they have some great recycling tips: http://planetgreen.discovery.com/go-green/recycling/top-recycling-tips.html

Thanks for the comment! - Kristin H.