The team turned to partners, such as Heritage Interactive, to find recyclersfor everything from plastic cupsto steel shavings topaper products.

ASK THE RIGHT QUESTION

Make 600 cars a day without producing garbage? When Subaru's parent company Fuji

Heavy Industries suggested Denise Coogan and her team get as close as possible to zero

landfill, she took on the challenge.

How do you eliminate all waste from a car plant the size of six-and-a-half football fields (3.8 million square feet) that produces

15 TONS OF WASTE EVERY 24 HOURS?

Team by team, station by station, her team dumped trash carts and containers on the floor, sortingeverything into piles.

Piles of plastic. Piles of steel. Piles of styro-foam,

cardboard, pallets, and everything else.

SEE FOR YOURSELF2

THE GREAT WORK CHALLENGE:

1

THE RESULTS OF GREAT WORK

A ZERO-LANDFILL FACILITY IN THE MAKING: SUBARU OF INDIANA

Team members looked for new places for all this waste to go.

Waste is just a material thathasn’t found its use yet.

WHAT CAN BE ELIMINATED:“Do we really need this thing? Could cardboard containers be replaced by more reusable containers? Could steel be saved or cut more e�ciently?”

WHAT COULD BE REUSED:“Could materials be refined and reused again and again? Styrofoam containers for spark plugs, have crossed the ocean 20 times to be alternatively emptied, filled, and emptied again.

WHAT CAN BE RECYCLED:“Can the cardboard we can’t get rid of get compacted into blocks that are stacked for recycling? Can the pallets we can’t reuse get sent o� and chipped up for garden mulch? Can food get composted from our cafeteria?

“”

Between shifts containers we’re turned over. Processes reexamined. Questions asked:

TALK TO YOUR OUTER CIRCLE3

The processes of reduce, reuse, recycle took the49 POUNDS OF WASTE GENERATED PER CAR AND REDUCED IT TO 0.07 POUNDS. But they weren’t done yet.

IMPROVE THE MIX4

What else could be improved upon to reach

the goal of 0% landfill? Another partner,

Covanta Energy was tasked to take the final

0.07 pounds and burn it to generate steam that spins the giant turbines that help power downtown Indianapolis.

DELIVER THE DIFFERENCE5

A car manufacturing plant as large as a small city, full of machinery, people and raw materials and producing 600 cars a day was sending less garbage to the curb then your family does. AND going landfill free was actually making money. Coogan calculated the

savings in 5 years of not bringing in extra steel and cardboard came to a

$10 million benefitfor the company.