What is recycled?
132,000 tons of grain annually is sold to cattle farmers for feed.
4.78 million pounds of glass is crushed and put into bunkers to be recycled.
3.6 million pounds of cardboard is shredded for reuse at Franklin Boxboard in Franklin.
469,000 pounds of aluminum cans are crushed, baled and sent to a recycling center.
TRENTON — At the MillerCoors Brewery, the green beer isn’t just for St. Patrick’s Day.
The state’s second largest brewery has made a concerted effort to reduce its environmental footprint by reducing and reusing all of the waste — from grain to glass — produced at the plant.
The brain child behind the project has been Kelly Harris, the plant’s sustainable development coordinator. With a 40-person “Green Team,” made up of hourly and salaried workers, he devised ways to streamline the brewery’s waste. This included encouraging workers to separate waste — such as boxes and plastic bottles — into color-coded bins and moving trash cans out of offices to encourage recycling.
Before the “Green Team,” the plant’s waste peaked at 0.17 pounds for every barrel of beer produced — more than 1.6 million pounds annually as MillerCoors brews 9.8 million barrels of beer, said Denise Quinn, plant manager.
As of March 2010, the brewery reached what is known as “zero waste,” meaning it is sending no trash to the landfill. About 99.8 percent of all the plant’s waste is recycled and the remaining 0.2 percent — mainly floor sweepings, bathroom trash and employee lunch waste — is sent to a waste-to-energy facility in Indiana to be burned as fuel, according to the company.
“Kelly gave us a goal of being landfill-free in five years. We did it in two,” said Quinn. “And we did it by being more creative, more efficient and by getting more people involved.”
With the brewery’s amount of annual waste, it’s no small feat, said Harris.
“It was thinking how much trash should we have and trying to get a buy-in from the (employees),” he said.
Much of the job is left to the plant’s 552 salaried and hourly workers. Each employee is responsible for sorting the waste they handle — whether that is damaged cans and glass bottles or floor sweepings — into the proper bins. Harris color-coded bins to match the colors of the products that go into them: the cardboard bin is spot-on for the tannish shade of a box. The receptacle for nonrecyclables is also red to remind workers to “stop and think before you throw it away,” Harris said.
Even office trash cans have been moved into the hallway, making it less likely for someone to throw away a recyclable material absent-mindedly.
“Why I think it works and what is true here is everyone who works here lives here — from Dayton to Cincinnati to Trenton, Middletown, Hamilton, Fairfield. And we value the community where we live,” Harris said.
Even the grain left over from making the beer is reused. Since the end product is high in protein, the grain is usable as feed for dairy cows, said Quinn.
While the plant does collect some revenue from the sale of the recycled materials, both Harris and Quinn said MillerCoors is in the business of making beer.
“It’s not a tangible benefit. It really is, ‘Can we do the right thing for our community?’ ” Quinn said.
The Trenton plant sprawls across 36 of the company’s 1,100 acres, making it quite a trek from one side of the facility to the other.
On any given day you’ll find brawny technicians pedaling to their destination on a tricycle complete with a basket — just another way MillerCoors is being green.
“We believe we are doing the right thing as a community neighbor. We want to be a sustainable development,” Quinn said.
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