Project eliminate
Garbage is one of the biggest environmental issues facing Metro Manila and many other cities. In Unilever, we want to make sure that our operations have the minimum possible effect on the environment. Our Paco factory and offices, in the middle of the city of Manila, have to maintain the highest standards.
We have already ensured that the factory does not pollute the air or the water. We have also reduced solid waste by 90% over recent years.
But in 2003, we found we were still responsible for 1200 tons of landfill. Not only was this bad for the environment, but it was costly—we were throwing away millions of pesos of materials. To address this concern, Unilever created Project Eliminate reached the target of having ZERO LANDFILL by end of year 2004. Our waste comes from paper from the offices, leftover food from the canteens, packaging materials from production, residues from our chemicals, and any more. Waste costs the company a lot of money for waste management, landfill fee, and lost packaging materials.
The Project Eliminate team therefore concentrated on the following goals:
• Reduce / Avoid waste as much as possible
• Sort all recyclables which cannot be avoided
• Develop processes to treat (instead of landfilling) the waste that cannot be recycled
Reduce/avoid
Some packaging materials are difficult to manufacture and used to generate solid waste that had to be land filled. Through Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), we improved our process and reduced waste by 80%. Further more, as plastic is made from oil, we developed a process to use the residual packing waste as a co-fuel for cement manufacture.
Recycle
A lot of our landfill could actually be recycled directly. Most waste could be sold. We set teams in place to improve sorting on the production lines. Now, we sell carton and plastic to recyclers. As a result, our garbage was reduced by 50%. For office waste, we developed a co-operation with the Smokey Mountain’s Materials Recovery Facility that hauls, sorts, and recycles our office wastes.
