The examination helped the company understand the type, destination, and quantity of ‘unproductive product’ and demonstrated how it could better manage loss. “It validated our sense of where we were,” Bell explains. “We were very pleased to see our gut instinct lined up with what the hard facts showed.”
Technology Lends a Hand
New technologies have proven critical for many cost-effective solutions. Wholesum Family Farms, Inc. plans to showcase its efforts at the Nogales Sustainability Expo in May. Because sustainability programs are expensive for single companies, Hannah La Luzerne, Wholesum’s sustainability manager, believes grower-shippers in the Nogales industry should work together to share processes and broaden the conversation about improving waste prevention.
Wholesum has found a mix of old and new technology can work well. The company has high-tech sensor-activated automatic doors but also uses an old cardboard baler instead of paying someone else to recycle its cardboard waste. “This technology is fairly low-tech and certainly not new, but it has totally transformed how we see recycling,” enthuses La Luzerne. Instead of paying to haul away cardboard, the baler turns “what was once an expensive waste stream into a revenue source that can be put toward other sustainability projects,” she explains. “It’s also a flexible solution that allows us to manage fluctuations in waste cardboard volume without spending more to recycle when volume is high or paying for capacity we don’t need when it is lower.”
Organically Grown Company sponsored its first sustainability summit back in 2005. It began tracking data that year and since then the Eugene, OR-based grower and distributor has achieved 93 to 96 percent waste elimination according to Kimberlee Chambers, supply chain and sustainability program manager. She attributes the high score to monthly meetings of a ‘zero waste’ committee, which is comprised of workers from throughout the company to help in the effort.
Crop Waste Disposal
One commodity with a high level of waste is onions. Growers and processors must deal with discarding mountains of peel waste, not to mention unmarketable onions for one reason or another. To reduce the unsaleable items, Gills Onions uses highly selective seed varieties and specialized fertilizing programs, which has helped reduce culling on the packing line. In turn, Hamman explains, this decreases shrink and disposal costs, and improves profits.
To deal with onion waste, Gills has been using an $11-million energy recovery system (put into operation in 2009) that converts discarded peels and other leftovers into renewable energy and cattle feed. Although it was a gamble to install the new waste-to-energy system, Hamman believes innovation always involves risk.
“At the end of the day, if this project cost double, we wouldn’t have been able to do it even if there was a willingness to go above and beyond and be [environmentally] responsible,” she comments. Hamman believes the true payoff, however, will come from creating less waste prior to processing. “As we develop better machines to sort, peel, and focus on avoiding generating waste to begin with—we’ll see huge results.”
