Glad Global Facilities Go Zero Waste
By Steve Clarke, Environmental & Sustainability Client Manager
From its products to its manufacturing operations, our Glad brand has been on a mission toward greater sustainability.
“We’re trying to make waste reduction at the center of everything we do,” says Ed Huber, vice president and general manager – Glad and Brita.
Reducing the amount of resin in our bags is just one way the Glad team is driving waste out of its supply chain.
We’re proud to announce that all of our Glad facilities worldwide have achieved zero-waste-to-landfill (ZWtL) status, from R&D’s lab in Willowbrook, Illinois, where Glad magic is created, to plants in the U.S., Canada and China, where we manufacture R&D’s innovations into quality Glad products, to the distribution facility from which we ship the finished product to customers.
No brand has contributed more to The Clorox Company’s goal to have 10 ZWtL sites by 2020 — a milestone we achieved two years early.
Think globally, act locally
While each facility produces or distributes Glad® products, they all followed their own paths to zero. Some places even required several years of dedicated effort to reach this goal. Facilities in rural areas struggled to find recycling partners nearby. Space-constrained offices carved out designated rooms and areas to collect recyclables. And facilities of all types collaborated with vendors to understand what could be recycled or composted based on local recycling vendors’ capabilities, and made purchasing decisions accordingly.
Driving behavior change
But fundamentally, waste-to-landfill is about people and their actions. So training new employees while reminding veterans about recycling best practices has been critical to ensuring each site sustains its ZWtL designation for the long term. Sites also have ongoing education on waste sorting processes for contractors and visitors.
The criteria for a facility to achieve Clorox “zero waste-to-landfill” status.
Given all the hurdles, we congratulate the dedicated employees who made the journey to zero waste possible at these Glad facilities:
- Orangeville, Ontario, Canada plant
- Rogers, Arkansas plant
- Easy Street Distribution Center, Arkansas
- Willowbrook, Illinois R&D
- Amherst, Virginia plant
- Conghua, China plant