Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Promotion and Practice of the 3Rs
Outside of Fairmount Minerals operations, we look at product end-of-life solutions as well as our local communities to promote and practice the 3Rs. We continue our relationship with Paygro, a supplier of soil and mulch products, to recover spent foundry sand from our customers for reuse in agricultural applications. In addition, our Technisand Wedron and Wedron Silica facilities in Illinois invited community members to participate in a recycling day at a local park. Other Fairmount facilities opened their recycling bins to the community and encouraged them to recycle household waste.
With a goal of zero waste by 2015, we focused on finding new and improved ways to reduce, reuse and recycle (3Rs) this past year. Working with suppliers, customers and our local communities, waste reduction and recycling are important priorities in our environmental sustainability practices. As we focused on expanding our measurement practices this past year, we found that our facilities and offices recycled 7.5 million pounds of waste.
The most effective approach to improving environmental impacts associated with waste is to simply eliminate waste before it is created. In 2009, we assessed our unloading practices and found opportunities to reduce the amount of sand left in trucks and rail cars. At our Santrol Yixing facility in China, we developed a process to reclaim off-grade product. Rather than dispose of it as waste, we remove the resin from the product and re-coat it to meet quality and performance criteria. Finally, with one change in the manufacturing process, we successfully reduced scrap in our FlexSand product line from nearly 30 percent to less than 5 percent.
Beyond reductions, reuse projects keep additional waste from entering landfills. Since beginning our bulk bag reuse program with a raw material supplier in 2005, we sought opportunities to expand the program to Fairmount Minerals customers. In 2009, we created informational literature and worked with two key customers to initiate a packaging reuse project that saved more than 194,000 pounds of waste from going to a landfill. We ship product to customers using the bulk bags and then work with a supplier to return and clean them. Once brought back to a Fairmount Minerals facility, we refill and send them out. At the end of their useful life, the reusable bulk bags can be recycled for a cradle-to-cradle sustainable solution.