Thanks for tuning in for Part 2 of this blog series! If you missed Part 1 click here! If you think it's easy going green, think again! Here we continue our discussion with Plant Manager (and blog fan favorite!) Peter Mullen on the transformation of a soon to be 60 thousand square foot pressure sensitive label printing facility. We hope you like what you read!
We invited in International Paper Products to have a conversation on how to turn waste into a product that would help the environment rather than just putting it into the ground. International paper Products has a program that takes material from companies such as ours and turns it into a Biomass fuel pellet that can power facilities that generate electricity for residents in the area. This made sense, but because the company was out of state and our “recycled material” would need to be trucked 260 miles to their facility for processing we needed to get creative to make it work.
In as little as 6 months we worked out a deal with them and found a trucking company that could handle the on call service we would require so our compactor would never be shut down. We also purchased 2 extra cans for the compactor so they could be switched out in a short period of time. To save on trucking costs and to be more efficient we haul two cans at a time to International Paper Products. Once we came up with a plan and negotiated the cost we were able to not only turn 95% of our waste into a useful product but we also would realize a savings of about 20% in waste handling cost. By the way- the other 5% goes to Waste Management’s land fill and is used to produce methane gas that in turn heats the University of New Hampshire. The students can thank us later!
This coming spring we are looking forward to building a 20,000 square foot addition to our facility and are currently exploring the idea of geo thermal for the purpose of heating and cooling the new building. If all works as planned we will incorporate the geo thermal into the existing building to supplement the existing system.
Thanks for tuning in!