Fairfield CT Green Team
To become the model for the rest of our company, the Production
Green Team has been working diligently towards refining and
improving our production and warehouse recycling efforts. Our
goal is to reduce and then eliminate waste from our production of
tea here in our Fairfield Plant. This does not come without
some big hurdles. We have paper, foil, corrugated, plastics,
plastic bags both clear and colored, card stock, cans and bottles,
glass, fluorescent bulbs, batteries, electronic items, metal,
nylon, and my least favorite disposable material of all STYROFOAM.
Hate it... this is probably the single most useless product
in America.
It is amazing how detailed recycling and composting can be.
The sizes and colors of bins, the location of these bins and
of course the removal of the said waste products, as they are
recovered from our manufacturing process. We are fast finding
out, that like in real estate and business location is everything.
Location determines how much more efficiently we can recover
our waste and still keep our fellow employees close to their work
stations. This way they can continue doing the jobs
efficiently, so the company can keep up with and exceed our tea bag
per minute standard. After all making tea bags is what we do
and someone has to operate and maintain the machinery, to reach 1
plus billion bags of tea per year.
Educating our co-workers is another one of our other challenges,
even our temporary employees are educated on what goes where.
Here at Bigelow we are always looking for alternatives to
"throwing out the trash". With this being said the rules for
disposal are forever changing what was trash today is recycled
tomorrow and that then might become compostable next week.
For instance in our cafeteria we went from products that
would be thrown out, to recyclable and now all of our cafeteria
utensils and serving ware are compostable. The company has
used physical samples, posters, videos, emails and the "recycling
police" (a group of employees telling people what goes where during
lunch breaks). With more training to come so we may become
more proficient, thus making our company and employees more
environmentally aware both here at work and at home.
Look for our greening efforts to take place in the near future
throughout the Fairfield facility. We should really be able
to increase our environmentally friendly waste and continue to
reduce our "bad trash" in the upcoming months with the help of all
our fellow employees.
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