Procter & Gamble and the case of the disappearing waste
How does the consumer products company ensure 99 per cent of raw materials leave its facilities as product or something of value?
By Will Nichols
02 Apr 2013
Procter & Gamble will today announce 45 of its sites across 20 countries now send zero waste to landfill, but the story of how it has achieved that landmark is far more interesting than simple operational efficiency.
Of course, as global waste management leader Forbes McDougall says, improving manufacturing processes has played a significant role in helping the consumer goods company’s waste programme rack up over $1bn in value for the business.
“For a long time we put a lot of effort into optimising manufacturing processes – about 96 per cent of the raw materials coming into plants now go out as product,” he says. “But we wrote-off the end of pipe stuff as a cost of doing business.But by finding a use for the near-impossible to eliminate by-products of the manufacturing process, P&G now ensures less than one per cent of all materials entering its sites across the globe leave as waste.
“And while our optimisation work was co-ordinated across the globe, the end of pipe stuff was being done on a site-by-site basis relying on enthusiastic individuals.”
That was until a purchasing team in Frankfurt spotted how much P&G was spending on waste management. “Millions of pounds in the UK alone,” says McDougall. “Multiple millions of dollars across the globe.”
The team thought that by putting hard-nosed purchasing principles into practice, such as leveraging scale, it could claw back some of this spending. The team then quickly grew into a global group tasked with developing creative solutions to reusing the four per cent of materials that were not being turned into Pampers, Gillette, Ariel or P&G’s other products.
“We started by helping sites sort separation, but then we got a bit more creative in finding partners that could bring technology to us,” MacDougall says. But after a couple of years, the company realised it was spending money to dispose of quite valuable materials.
“We started to think of this stuff as a resource – in an ideal world we don’t want to be thinking about waste management at all,” McDougall says.
“So we said we didn’t want to pay you – we want you to pay to use these materials,” McDougall continues, before admitting: “It went down better in some places than others.”
One of the most interesting examples of this approach is how P&G deals with excess production of Fairy detergent. Around 600 tonnes of unusable liquid is collected and mixed with water to create a new formula that is then used for industrial cleaning of road signs and trucks.
Then there are razor cartridges from P&G’s Venus range that are shredded, separated from the blades using a magnet, and melted, dyed and moulded into broom handles. Around 1.2 million broom handles are produced in this way each year, which are 80 per cent made from recycled razor cartridges.
However, perhaps the most impressive product is made using paper sludge from manufacturing Charmin toilet roll in Mexico. By mixing the sludge with cardboard scraps and water, a small local firm produces 128,000 roofing tiles and 25 million bricks a month.
McDougall says the company ensures that these innovative suppliers are not wholly reliant on its waste products, so that they are not left without a business if P&G does improve its processes.
Of course, these kinds of suppliers – and many forms of waste infrastructure – are not readily available across the globe, which means in many cases the solutions are not applicable from country-to-country.
But there is no let-up in the company’s ambition to spread the zero waste message to more of its 150 sites – over the years to 2020 it intends to continue reducing manufacturing waste to landfill so that it accounts for less than 0.5 per cent of input materials.
And having tackled the large volume waste stream, McDougall says the company is left with “smaller volume, ‘difficult’ materials that we are going to have to get creative with and really look outside of P&G for innovative solutions”.
McDougall is confident the target can be met, and expects more facilities to become available as tightening environmental regulations and cost constraints push more companies down this route.
“It seems simple and straight-forward, but so many companies don’t seem to be doing it,” he says. “But as environmental legislation improves, the price is only going up. So there is a clear incentive to work on it.”
