Mansfield Plumbing, Perrysville, Ohio, recycles 330,000 pounds each year of cardboard and cartons that are sorted, cleaned and sold to paper mills that use the material to manufacture a variety of paper products. Six thousand unusable wooden pallets are either refurbished or made into mulch. And, 3,000 pounds of plastic, 8,900 pounds of paper and 520 pounds of aluminum cans also are recycled yearly. Finally, the company has initiated a water conservation program designed to reduce water usage by 10 percent to 30 percent at its manufacturing facility.
"Our efforts don't stop with just the hard materials you can physically see in our plant," says Ed Tinoco, environmental engineer at Mansfield Plumbing. "We actually recycle energy. Waste heat from our kilns is recovered and used in both the drying process of our sanitary ware and to heat our water for factory operations.
"Additionally, we've reduced the natural gas needed to operate our plant. We estimate our gas consumption to be about 10 percent below the industry standard on a per pound measurement. We also undertook a lighting project in 2008 that has helped us save about 50 percent of the energy over our previous lighting system."
Tinoco points out that recycling and reuse efforts at the company are second nature to employees. "Mansfield Plumbing has created a mindset that makes it routine for our team members to actively support environmental initiatives," he says. "We have operational excellence guidelines developed that fully support our daily goal of maximizing energy reuse and reclaiming efforts.
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