Dive Brief:
- Toyota Motor Corp.’s parts centers in Ontario, CA and Hebron, KY, as well as Cincinnati, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland, are participating in the company’s national recycling program. The project, slated to expand to other centers over the next couple of years, is facilitated by one single-stream recycling vendor, Boles Parts Supply, Inc., who takes the auto manufacturer’s parts and packaging from six sites, as reported in Plastics News.
- The six sites currently participating decreased their carbon footprint to the tune of 67 tons of salvaged plastics between April 2014 and June 2015. In its first 15 months, the scrap program, launched in Ontario and Hebron, captured more than 40,000 pounds of foam and cloth from those two sites. By the time the program was operating in four locations, it recycled 88,000 pounds of foam, rubber, glass and cloth in 14 months.
- Toyota hopes to expand its national recycling program to Mansfield, MA, West Caldwell, NJ, Glen Burnie, MD, Aurora, IL, Kansas City, MO, and Dallas by the end of its 2017 fiscal year.
Dive Insight:
Items that were once landfilled are being repurposed while Toyota maintains its desired quality control.
"Toyota is very protective of our product and our quality. And scrap, we were handling that to ensure that defective products don’t get out in the marketplace somehow," said Juliana Dee, manager of the recycling program at Toyota’s North American Parts Operation (NAPO).
The company’s one-vendor strategy enables the manufacturing giant to standardize and implement prioritized controls while recycling more materials, including those it was unable to salvage on its own, like plastic bumper covers.
"Our goal every day is to get parts in the door and get parts out the door. When you start talking about recycling and separation, it is cumbersome for the facilities to manage that and try to do the right thing every day … We are able to rely on [Boles] to make sure this stuff does not end up in the landfill," said Ernest Lopez of Toyota’s NAPO.
The company’s commitment to the environment extends to other initiatives such as the Toyota Green Initiative (TGI), and environmental stewardship platform that educates on the benefits of sustainable living.
It's most recent environmental endeavor has been plans for its Georgetown, KY plant to tap into landfill methane gas for electricity, which like the recycling program, is part of its set goal to drastically reduce its auto's emissions over coming years.
