Waste Not
By Montag | Related entries in Corporate Business, Environment, Good DecisionsFrom Wired News:
Each week, hundreds of new Subaru and Isuzu cars and trucks roll out of the Subaru factory in Lafayette, Indiana. What doesn’t come out of the plant is garbage. When the garbage truck rolls up to the curb in front of your house each week, it haul away more trash than is generated by the manufacturing processes at the factory.
The factory is the first auto assembly plant in North America to become completely waste-free: last year, 100 percent of the waste steel, plastic and other materials coming out of the plant were reused or recycled.
Wired News: At Clean Plants, It’s Waste Not
Because landfill charges are so high companies are compelled to reduce their waste production. A better approach to environment issues: don’t allow companies to ‘externalize’ the costs of pollution & waste. When they are forced to pay for the damage they cause, they will solve the problem for the sake of the bottom line.
More on this topic at a later date.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 10th, 2005 and is filed under Corporate Business, Environment, Good Decisions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 10th, 2005 at 11:21 am
Any cost incurred by the company in dealing with waste is just passed on to the consumer. It doesn’t matter what it costs to dump waste at the landfill, the end consumer will pay for it. Subaru built an enviromentally friendly plant, which costs a lot more to build and maintain. The price of their cars will (or already has) rise accordingly.
The one benefit they have is that enviromentalists will flock to their automobiles. It’s just another marketing ploy.
August 10th, 2005 at 6:19 pm
Ultimately your right, but I’d rather the cost be built into the product as dollars rather than being passed on as a pollution / waste burden heaved on ‘the commons’ of our air, water, and landfills (if not land, if waste leaks into it) that must be endured (re: this is the cost) by those who did not even purchase / benifit from the product.
August 11th, 2005 at 11:10 am
“Any cost incurred by the company in dealing with waste is just passed on to the consumer. It doesn’t matter what it costs to dump waste at the landfill, the end consumer will pay for it. ”
And who else should pay for it? Why is the God-almighty consumer off limits?
June 25th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
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