Sonoco Awards Two Plants for Landfill Diversion

Sonoco, Hartsville, S.C., says two of its facilities have achieved landfill-free status and have been awarded a Gold Tier Sonoco Sustainability Star Award.

Working with Sonoco Recycling, the Birmingham, Ala., Cascades Sonoco facility became landfill-free in June of 2011, and the York, Pa., CorrFlex facility went landfill-free in October.

To achieve its Sonoco Sustainability Star Gold Tier landfill-free status, Sonoco requires 99 percent of all waste to be diverted from landfills. Sonoco CorrFlex and Cascades Sonoco met this requirement by taking their facilities completely landfill-free.

The Cascades Sonoco plant is currently diverting all of its waste through a combination of recycling, the use of waste-to-energy alternatives and composting. “Our initial goal was simply to reduce the waste we were land-filling as much as possible, without increasing our disposal costs,” says Emmanuel Boullay, plant manager. “Once we began, however, we kept looking for ways to do more until we were landfill-free.”

Brian Roach, Sonoco Recycling representative for the Cascades Sonoco plant, says, “One of our biggest challenges was food waste. Currently, we’re composting, and have plans to install disposals in our sinks to better help us handle food.”

The York CorrFlex facility achieved landfill-free status through a combination of waste-to-energy (WTE) landfill diversion and a comprehensive recycling program.

“We were able to divert two landfill waste streams, ink printing cake waste and general plant waste, to WTE,” says Randy Bergman, plant manager for the Sonoco CorrFlex facility. Bergman says WTE incineration is recognized by CorrFlex’s major customers as an acceptable landfill diversion.

More about the Sonoco Sustainability Star Award program can be found here.

Sonoco Recycling operates globally and collects more than 3 million tons of old corrugated containers, various grades of paper, metals and plastics each year.

Sonoco Recycling is a division of Sonoco, founded in 1899 and now a $4.1 billion global manufacturer of industrial and consumer products and provider of packaging services. Sonoco has more than 300 operations in 34 countries. More information on the company can be found at www.sonoco.com/.