1st Breakout

• New CFL light bulbs popular, but how to dispose them?
• Waste Management: Walmart sold over 300,000 CFL lightbulbs, burn out in a year or so and mercury vapor will contaminate landfill
• How can we increase diversion and keep things out of the landfills?
• Fayetteville Chamber of Congress—going around to businesses locally to encourage greening operations through water and energy assessments
• Waste Management—handle a lot of hazardous things recovered from businesses, also recovering materials such as plastics to eventually put back onto the shelves
• Businesses have to work together in their relationships to allow for greening operations to start taking effect
• Marriott: working on communicating for managers and associates to jump on board for greening operations—ie ordering the appropriate amount of newspapers—ask customers at check-in if they want a newspaper, newspaper order due by 2 and associates cannot wrap their head around that. Have to think about customer impact
  
  
  • Marriott: House-keeping staff—change sheets for multi-day guests? New towels? Sometimes housing staff get into routine of changing when they don’t need to
• Electrolux: for every vacuum that is sold, one goes into the dumpster. Getting those old vacuums back from customers and recycled is key.
• Waste-Management: must educate customer. i.e. packaging info. WM logo lets people know locations they can recycle
• Don’t want shipping to be more expensive than what the product is worth
• SEEP—through Wal-Mart, huge impact and greater visibility
• Nester Hosiery: about 82% diversion
• Waste-Management—finding homes for recyclables, lowering amount of waste going into landfill
• Nester Hosiery: even though diverting stuff, aren’t great at it. Need to become more efficient with production, cut down costs. With scraps, use diversion. Currently don’t get revenue share on diverting, but they divert to landfill at no cost.
  
  
  • Nester Hosiery: co-mingled material wool socks, yarn waste. Waste-Management mentioned to make sure they get certificate of destruction
• Waste—anything that doesn’t add value to the customer
• Rockline Industries: baby wipes—unrecyclable at the moment. What to do with wet-waste? Organic fibers will compost but plastic fibers will not.

2nd Breakout

• Waste Management: Green Squad, getting facilities energy star rating
• Nester Hosiery: consumers only see recycling as a revenue generator and not primarily “green”
• Driving for more businesses in NW Arkansas to build green facilities
• Tontitown-landfill and powerplant
• Nester Hosiery: Micropolitan area—town itself 10,000 but surrounding counties and areas cause the population of interest to be much larger
• GE—Eco-imagination—GE goes into facilities factories (started internally) and organize the energy and water
  
  
  • “Treasure Hunting”—3 day process, starts during downtime at sundown. Groups of employees trained to look for different opportunities to save money. i.e. water team, motor team, lighting team. i.e. Lighting team walks around looking for lighting that is on during non-operating hours. Also looking for whether they could use more energy-efficient lighting. All of the different teams’ Ideas are presented to management. It is a money saving opportunity and it gets employees involved and informed. Originally done by Toyota, now GE does this country-wide. Can save millions. GE asks for percentage of savings if successful after process. If not successful, you only pay for traveling expenses. A consultant hired to make sure you keep up with the goals you set with GE
• Have to get employees to be engaged in this vision of sustainability—down to the hourly-wage workers
• Nester Hosiery: explaining to employees the plan for sustainability and why, employees interested in being a part of a “green team”
• Nester Hosiery: viable, affordable ways to get rid of waste without being penalized by the state? Company needs lighting. Florescent lightbulb will burn out, will be disposed and will have mercury vapor. Looking for better options, currently recycling lightbulbs costs 3X as much as buying brand new bulbs.
• Waste Management: has solutions, finding synergy
• Lighting retrofit—rebate
• Battery Recycling: Call to Recycling—organization, ship batteries in box provided by organization and is no cost to company
• Group discussed that more networking events are needed…so many good ideas and partnerships.
• Waste Management: state-of-the-art informative building in Rogers opening up in the spring. i.e. One room shows you what it is like to walk into a landfill
• Nester Hosiery: Waste-energy—use methane gas from landfill as energy to power an industrial facility. Landfill 3-4 miles from their facility, could be a possibility in the future bc they use some natural gas to power plant.
• Waste Management—$13 bil. Company, $9 bil. In the ground
• Waste Management—only manage landfills, never own them. 30 yr. cap, then government takes over land. non recyclables put in landfill and capped when filled up.
• Fayetteville: businesses have to take recycling to a center themselves, it hasn’t been cost effective and has been hard to push recycling-policies
• EDF: helps investors save money through environmental strategies, helped partnering companies save $160m last year
• When kids, people put anything in a trashcan, lit it on fire and put lid on it. Recycling has definitely developed so much in the last 20+ years
• Waste Management—partnered with school, a teacher usually spends $500-$1500/yr out of own pocket for classroom. Program raised $9,000 for teachers
• EcoPotential—focusing on recycling and sustainability for a profit, located in Springdale, 3 year old company. 3 or 4 subcontractors, a lot of work with commercial office. Would like to expand into the Wal-Mart realm. Launched company 3 yrs ago when Wal-Mart started their sustainability movement
• Nester Hosiery: wool socks, 30-40 customers. outdoor industry (running, biking, hiking, etc.) majority of retailers. Retailers such as Wal-Mart moving more towards more sustainable products. Getting EMS certified a goal…
• SEW: solid waste, energy, and water 3 biggest focus points. No in-house dying—buy pre-dyed fibers, majority of water use is to wash the socks at a specific temperature to shrink the socks to the desired size. Packaging is a concern, but not a huge concern bc retailing customers design packaging and packaging is outsourced to another company. Socks have great potential for packaging reduction, but not focusing on that now. REI specifies packaging, Wal-Mart does not.
• Nester Hosiery: Measuring volume of selling unit—ratio of volume of product/volume of packaged product very close to 1 (packaging is band around socks). Put so many finished products into bag and sent to retailer. Wal-Mart wants exactly 24 selling units/case. There is so much more air-space in the case that has potential to put more socks into case, may have to make a custom case to fit exactly 24. Wants to work with Wal-Mart to better utilize packaging.
• Usability of packaging—reusable? Reusable for consumer or retailer? Reverse logistics? Consumers don’t need the packaging generally, but some things required such as information for the consumer. Put information by product instead of with every packaged good?
• Nester Hosiery: IceBreaker—high-end clothing company—they market their product by stating the wool they use in their garments naturally airs out and does not need to be washed after every use—very sustainable