Austrim Raises Bottom Line The Green Way
The Age
Monday September 17, 2001
Working with cloth can be a messy business. Austrim Textiles, like many of its competitors, found itself in a desperate battle to keep its factory floor clear of encroaching piles of offcuts, discarded packaging and clouds of dust.
Dumpster trucks were visiting the Thomastown company almost as often as suppliers and buyers, carting away tonnes of rubbish each week.
But the implementation of waste minimisation and recycling programs has enabled the company to reduce rubbish going to landfill by 50per cent, generating $36,000 a year in savings.
It has not been a simple process. Austrim first explored the possibility of cutting down on waste in 1994, engaging EcoRecycle Victoria to help.
Austrim operations manager Mike Fisher said that an examination of the production process revealed possibilities for waste reduction in the disposal of cloth offcuts, lining of containers for product storage and transport, and the reuse of cardboard tubing.
Mr Fisher said the company was sending more than 200kilograms of fabric offcuts and trimming, stuffed into enormous plastic bags, to landfill each week.
Adding to the company's rubbish pile was the large amount of plastic film used to line containers to protect cloth from dirt and moisture during storage and shipment.
``We used to have 10 or 12dumpster trucks all going to landfill each week," Mr Fisher said.
``And the place was messy, with scraps of cloth and dust everywhere. We started to think of ways we could reduce what we put into the dumpsters." He said the biggest challenge was not identifying how to reduce waste, but finding other uses for it.
Mr Fisher said it took a consultant six months to find a business that could use Austrim's cloth offcuts and scraps.
For the past eight months, the bulky material, instead of taking up space in landfill, has been used to make bath mats and pet collars and leads.
The company also invested in a plastic-film baler, which meant all the plastic used in storage and transport could be easily recycled, adding $36,000 a year to its bottom line.
Another organisation to realise significant savings from reducing rubbish is Monash University.
Since implementing a recycling and waste minimisation strategy in March last year, it is estimated to have saved almost $70,000 in paper and printing costs alone.
Manager of strategy and innovation at the university's Monash Environment Institute, Elya Tagar, said that, with advice from EcoRecycle, some simple yet effective opportunities to reduce waste were identified.
Mr Tagar said that in the past year Monash had saved $50,000 in printing and paper costs by eliminating banner sheets every time students used university printers.
Monash has also saved $17,000 by striking a recycling deal with paper company Softex to collect and recycle used stationery and resell it to the university as toilet paper.
Mr Tagar said the environmental programs have been embraced by staff and have won over a sceptical management by delivering savings.
``Management attitudes have changed a lot," he said. ``When I first started there was a lot of resistance to the idea of putting money behind environment issues. But now we have a full-time environment officer and we are putting significant funds towards recycling coordinators."
Mr Fisher and Mr Tagar said the recycling and waste minimisation programs would have been ineffective without strong staff support and, aside from saving money, had raised workplace morale.
Mr Tagar said Monash had 70volunteer workplace ``champions" to encourage the recycling effort.
Mr Fisher said Austrim staff now took a pride in the cleanliness of their workplace and their contribution to waste reduction.
EcoRecycle said more than 230 Victorian businesses had joined the Waste Wise program but, with industries including construction and demolition contributing up to 65 per cent of the state's landfill waste, there was still a long way to go.
© 2001 The Age