Lipton® Tea Facility Achieves Zero-Landfill Goal
In September 2009, Unilever’s Lipton Tea manufacturing plant in Suffolk, Virginia, the largest tea processing facility in the United States, achieved its goal of becoming a “zero-landfill” facility. The Suffolk plant sends no waste to landfills by processing all of its waste through its aggressive recycling and composting programs and converting some of it into usable energy.
The team at the Lipton Suffolk facility began taking steps to achieve its zero-landfill goal in 2007, forming partnerships with Sonoco, a global packaging and recycling leader that offers recycling consulting services through its Sonoco Sustainability Solutions (S3) program; with McGill Composting to help convert bio waste into compost, some of which is reused in an environmentally acceptable way as soil, fertilizer and mulch on the Suffolk facility’s own grounds; and with the Southeastern Public Service Authority’s waste-to-energy facility, to turn some waste into usable energy to provide steam for the U.S. Navy's largest shipyard in nearby Portsmouth, Va., along with creating electricity that is sold through the electrical grid.
With other progressive new waste management procedures in place – including eliminating plastic strapping on pallets, replacing non-recyclable cleaning wipes with reusable rags, and choosing sturdier, reusable plastic pallets over traditional wooden ones – 70 percent of the plant’s waste is recycled or reused; 22 percent is composted; and the remaining eight percent is converted into usable energy.
The Lipton facility’s achievement also allows the plant team to conserve:
16 tons of plastic, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 13.76 tons
21,182 mature trees, the equivalent of 262 million sheets of newspaper
576,898 gallons of oil, enough to heat and cool 2,856 homes for a year
29,904 gallons of gasoline, enough to drive more than 837,000 miles in the average American car
8,722,000 gallons of water, enough to meet the daily fresh water needs of 116,293 Americans
5,108,600 kilowatt hours of electricity, or a year’s supply of power for more than 425 average homes
