The Procter & Gamble Company on December 6 announced that its Auburn, Maine, site became the first P&G manufacturing plant in North America to achieve zero waste to landfill.
The feminine care facility worked with both employees and suppliers to implement a process that beneficially uses 100 percent of its waste. A majority – more than 60 percent – is recycled or reused, while the remainder is converted to energy.
The P&G Global Asset Recovery Purchases (GARP) team – charged with finding external partners that can turn waste and non-performing inventory into something useful – connected the plant with a site solution provider, who helped sort all recyclable materials and convert existing non-recyclable materials to energy through incineration. The electricity from incineration is used by the incineration facility and the excess is sold to the local power company. The GARP team has diverted tens of thousands of tons from landfills while delivering tens of millions of dollars in cost recovery to the company in the past year alone.
"Auburn's success is the latest milestone in our continued global effort to achieve zero manufacturing waste sent to landfill," said Len Sauers, P&G vice president of global sustainability. "GARP is a terrific example of how internal innovation and external partnerships have joined to help realize the company's sustainability vision and goals."
Auburn is the ninth P&G global manufacturing plant to earn this distinction. Some of the other sites that have achieved this status include our Fabric and Home Care site in Belgium, Beauty & Grooming site in the United Kingdom, Feminine Care site in Hungary and Italy.
The achievement of these sites to reach zero waste to landfill demonstrates continued progress toward P&G's long-term environmental vision. This vision includes having zero manufacturing waste globally going to landfills, instead being beneficially reused and ending up in valued waste streams. The company also has a goal to achieve less than 0.5 percent disposed manufacturing waste by 2020.
About Procter & Gamble
Four billion times a day, P&G brands touch the lives of people around the world. The company has one of the strongest portfolios of trusted, quality, leadership brands, including Pampers, Tide, Ariel, Always, Whisper, Pantene, Mach3, Bounty, Dawn, Gain, Pringles, Charmin, Downy, Lenor, Iams, Crest, Oral-B, Duracell, Olay, Head & Shoulders, Wella, Gillette, Braun and Fusion. The P&G community includes approximately 127,000 employees working in about 80 countries worldwide.
