Higher roads

Detroit-based General Motors Corporation says that the company recycles more scrap from its worldwide facilities than any other automaker.

Considering that the company is one of the top automakers in the world, with 2013 global says of 9.7 million cars and trucks, its status as one of the most significant recyclers among its peers is not all that surprising.

What is unexpected or unusual is the company’s perspective on recycling or upcycling the almost 2 million tonnes of byproducts generated each year by its facilities around the world.

And there is no shortage of facilities for General Motors (GM). The company and its partners produce vehicles in 30 countries, selling them under the Chevrolet, Cadillac, Baojun, Buick, GMC, Holden, Jiefang, Opel, Vauxhall and Wuling brand names.

General Motors says its plants recycle around 90% of their worldwide manufacturing scrap, which equates to about 2 million tonnes of material from manufacturing operations.

A related factor in the company’s recycling work is that, as of October 2014, GM now has 122 manufacturing and nonmanufacturing facilities around the world that have achieved landfill-free status, including more than half of its manufacturing operations.

These landfill-free facilities, located in Asia, Europe, South America and North America, “recycle, reuse or convert to energy all waste from daily operations,” the company reports in an October 2014 announcement. GM previously announced its goal to reach 125 landfill-free facilities by 2020, a target the automaker is well on its way to attaining. Many of these successes are in no small part reflective of the company’s successes when it comes to reducing, reusing and recycling its scrap.

At the heart of those efforts is John Bradburn, GM’s global manager of waste reduction. A self-proclaimed conservationist and 20-plus-year veteran of the company, Bradburn says GM generates enough byproducts in one year’s time to fill the backs of so many Chevy Silverado pickups that if parked end to end would wrap around the world. And all of these byproducts, he says, are recycled or reused. However, he says, the company’s ultimate ideal would be not to generate these byproducts at all.

“Obviously when a company can take something it generates and either recycle it or reuse it within its own system, that’s usually the best option,” he observes. In addition, Bradburn says GM applies the lessons learned across all of its operations to broaden the positive impact of its environmental strategies.

Helping the company achieve these goals have undoubtedly been the numerous initiatives and innovative ideas implemented in recent years to help reduce landfilling of materials and divert manufacturing byproducts to recycling or to reuse.

Bradburn says GM adheres to a strict resource efficiency policy that calls for recycling and reuse as significant components of its waste management strategy.

“We have around 2.2 million [U.S.]tons a year of byproducts that we generate,” says Bradburn. “Our pollution prevention hierarchy is to eliminate, reuse, recycle and compost, in that order.” If those options are not there, he adds, the byproducts will go to waste for energy if that option available. Landfilling, for those sites that still do this, is considered the last resort.

Bradburn says GM considers its byproducts not as streams to be managed but as resources that are “out of place.” The company estimates that it is realising around $1 billion per year in revenue from the recycling and reuse of byproducts from operations. This is made possible, the company reports, by a holistic management system that combines environmental and financial benefits of all operational materials. The company also reports a 10-million-tonne reduction in carbon dioxide emissions in 2013, reached by way of its recycling and reuse programs. And while realising revenue from scrap is certainly admirable, he says, there are more important objectives to be reached.
 

Ideas for paper and plastics

The automaker is constantly working on ways to recycle everything, from the traditional commodities, such as metals, paper and plastics, to tires and even foundry sand and oil and paint sludges.

A notable example of this philosophy in action is the recently completed three-year-long project involving the recycling of recycled oil booms used in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil booms are long, cylindrical socks that were floated on the surface of the gulf waters to absorb the spilled oil.

Bradburn recalls those worrying days when the world watched as thousands of gallons of crude oil gushed up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico while experts scrambled to figure out to do to address the problem.

“People were thinking up ideas, and there were lots of ideas floating around,” says Bradburn, “and we had one.”

GM drew on its experience with oil recovery and absorbents used in its plants. Bradburn says he formed a small team, including engineers from partner companies GM has worked with. One such company was able to use its centrifuge technology to squeeze out the oil and water from the soaked booms.

“We set up a project at the gulf to recover—and we did—227 miles of the used oil booms used to clean up the gulf spill,” he says.

The collected booms were centrifuged and split open, so that polypropylene (PP) material could be removed and recycled into resin. This resin was then combined with other materials, such as GM’s used tires and other scrap plastics, and then molded into plastic air deflectors for the Chevrolet Volt, Bradburn says.

The company worked with partners Heritage Environmental Services, Indianapolis, Mobile Fluid Recovery of Birmingham, Alabama, and GDC Inc., Goshen, Indiana, on the project.

“We made three years worth of production parts for the Chevy Volt from that,” Bradburn says, explaining that the 100% recycled content parts included 25% of its material from the recycled oil booms.

“It was quite a challenge from a chemical property and quality issue,” Bradburn recalls, “because obviously it had to meet the specifications for the part; but, we got it done.”

Bradburn says the project also diverted 212,500 pounds of materials from landfill or from being recovered as an energy source, which would have been another possible option. The project also eliminated 149 tons of carbon emissions.

As far as plastics recycling goes, the booms project is just one example of the company’s efforts in this area. GM also has a successful caps and plugs program in place to deal with the 200,000 pounds per year of plastics generated at each plant from the protective covers supplied on threaded parts that are received into plants.

“We make baffles from those in some instances,” says Bradburn. He explains that these materials are sent to a processor that creates a resin from the caps that can be used to make various baffles and shrouds or air management deflectors for GM vehicles.

An addition, he says all the test tires from the company’s Michigan testing grounds—equating to a couple of truckloads per month—go to a shredding facility, where they are ground into a powder-like material that, when combined with other materials such as PP, can be made into baffles and deflectors.

“These are high-volume parts that we call functional black plastics,” says Bradburn. The parts are used for air management and sound baffling as well as for conduits for wire that are used throughout the vehicles, he says.

Another project GM has spearheaded has been its work to collect cardboard its plants and recycle it, with the help of its supplier base, into vehicle parts, including sound absorption headliner material. Cardboard shipping materials from various GM plants are recycled into what Bradburn describes as a superior sound-dampening material that now comprises 25% of the headliner in Buick Lacrosse and Verano vehicles to help keep the cabin quiet.

“Sure, we recycle a lot of cardboard traditionally, but we’re also making vehicle parts,” Bradburn says.

To do this, packaging byproducts from plants are collected, baled, shipped out and processed, then shipped back to the plant as vehicle parts, he explains. The company has worked with Federal-Mogul Corporation, based in Southfield, Michigan, for about a decade to develop this material from GM’s cardboard packaging material.

In the resulting process, cardboard is shredded and combined with postindustrial polyester fibres. “That then creates a lofted, very lightweight part of which has outstanding acoustic, sound insulation type benefits,” Bradburn explains. The parts are used in vehicle headliners and other areas as sound absorbing and insulating substrates. According to Bradburn, 25% of those parts come from the scrap cardboard from GM plants.

“So it’s upcycling, but it’s also a way for a company to be responsible for their particular streams,” Bradburn says. While the program has not yet expanded beyond North America, “we’re working on that,” he adds.
 

Moving metals

GM also generates, as one might imagine, a significant amount of scrap metals. “Those metals we help manage within the plants in conjunction with our purchasing group,” says Bradburn. This GM scrap team, as it is called, then approves purchase orders for these materials, which in turn generate revenue.

One long-term partnership the company has had in place pertains to precious metals recovery. “We’ve got a long-running contract with a company in the U.S. which receives various materials from us if they’re not used on vehicles,” he says, referring to unused catalytic converters as one example. “The scrap is earmarked for them and used to create newer catalytic converters, so it’s a closed-loop recycling program for us.”

Bradburn says the program creates benefits both for GM and for its supplier. “It keeps that special material in its use phase for the same purpose,” he explains.

Bradburn says while GM’s metals recycling program certainly dates back to the company’s earlier days, over the years the company has always worked to improve on those efforts. One example of this improvement is a project involving excess sheet metal.

“We found a few years ago in one of our plants the opportunity to reuse scrap metal as compared to recycling, so it wouldn’t go through that environmental burden of melting, shredding melting, reforming,” Bradburn says. The project dealt with the large cut-outs of sheet metal from the windows of GM trucks.

The company worked with a small outside supplier that was looking for heating and air conditioning ductwork metal. The organization realised the scrap metal generated by GM would work for its needs, so it began buying some of the material at a slightly higher value than if the metal was sold as scrap, Bradburn says. The supplier then stamped out the parts it needed from the window cutouts, reusing the material instead of recycling it.

“Things like that are what we look for,” says Bradburn. “It gains a little more revenue, but it also helps from what’s called the life-cycle impact of various materials.”
 

Next-level recycling

Bradburn observes that while recycling of GM’s operational byproducts is an admirable goal that has yielded revenue for the company, ultimately GM is working towards the next steps beyond simply recycling its scrap streams.

Speaking of the recycled commodity streams, he says, “We’ve made a lot of money over the years and that’s good, but we know we can do better.”

Towards that end, Bradburn points to GM’s numerous reduction and reuse initiatives as equally important strategies that are intended to push the company’s efforts to the next levels in terms of sustainability.

Bradburn says standards for its landfill-free facilities are extremely tight across the board, and that has helped drive recycling. “We require all daily manufacturing operations to be processed in a way that doesn’t include landfilling,” he says. That means everything, including trash and sludge.

Such a standard is what drove the company to complete what Bradburn calls an extremely challenging oil recycling program in Rochester, New York, where the company is taking used machine oil, centrifuging it to remove contaminants, then filtering it to remove water so it can be reused back in the plant. The two-phase process is yielding cost savings of $8 to 10 per gallon, which Bradburn says helped pay for the landfill-free program there.

However he adds, “Once the operation is landfill-free doesn’t mean you’re done.” For GM that means continually assessing the byproducts generated at its plants and working to eliminate or process and reuse them, preferably in its operations.

“That’s the real goal, as compared to making a lot of money off of materials,” Bradburn says. “We’d rather consume it all and make zero revenue from our byproducts.”

The author is managing editor of Recycling Today Global Edition and can be reached at lmckenna@gie.net.