Zero landfill is one of the easiest claims in this industry to make and one of the hardest to substantiate, because substantiating it requires you to know where every pound of material went and to have a piece of paper from the person who received it.
This is the sixth year we have published the accounting. It is also the first year it nearly broke, twice.
The year
| Stream | Weight | Destination | Tickets |
|---|---|---|---|
| HDPE regrind | 543,000 lb | Pipe, conduit, pallet and crate processors | 41 |
| Baled steel — cages | 247,000 lb | Regional mill | 22 |
| Baled steel — bases | 71,000 lb | Regional mill | 22 |
| Polypropylene fittings | 18,400 lb | PP reprocessor | 9 |
| Mixed non-container waste (office, packaging) | 6,200 lb | Municipal recycling and waste | — |
| Container material to landfill | 0 lb | — | — |
Note the fifth row. Our office generates rubbish like every office and some of it goes to a landfill. The claim is specifically about container material — the bottles, cages, bases and fittings that arrive here as containers. We have never claimed to be a zero-waste company and we are not one.
The two occasions it nearly broke
March: the contaminated batch
A batch of roughly 4,000 lb of granulated HDPE was rejected by the receiving processor for contamination — a container had gone through the line with a residue that had not been fully washed out, and it tainted the batch.
The path of least resistance was a skip. What we did instead was re-wash the flake, which took two days of line time, lost money on the batch, and got it accepted on the second presentation. The relevant weight ticket is dated 21 March and the re-wash cost us about $1,400 against a tipping fee of maybe $190.
August: the cage nobody wanted
A load of 3,100 lb of baled cage steel came back from the mill because the bales included too much non-ferrous material — valve bodies and adapters that had not been fully stripped before baling. Our error, entirely.
It went back onto the yard, got broken down and re-sorted by hand over three days, and went out again on 2 September. It also produced a permanent change to our stripping procedure, which now separates fittings at the decommission station rather than at the baler.
The number underneath the number
Zero landfill is the headline and it is not the figure we care about most. This one is:
| Route | Containers | Share | CO₂e avoided per unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reused after rinse | 11,214 | 60.9% | 88 kg |
| Washed and returned to service | 4,102 | 22.3% | 83 kg |
| Rebottled | 1,096 | 6.0% | 55 kg |
| Cage salvaged for another unit | 561 | 3.0% | 36 kg |
| Upcycled into a fabricated product | 168 | 0.9% | 31 kg |
| Granulated and milled | 1,271 | 6.9% | 30 kg |
| Landfilled | 0 | 0% | 0 kg |
Ninety-three percent of containers arriving here left as containers. That is the figure that matters, because granulating a container recovers roughly 34% of the burden of manufacturing its replacement and reusing it recovers essentially all of it.
If you want the tickets
Ask. We send them. They are not interesting reading — they are weighbridge dockets from processors and a mill — and they are the entire difference between a claim and an assertion.
Any supplier making this claim should be able to do the same within a day. If they cannot, the claim is describing an intention rather than a record.