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Largest U.S. Pillow Maker Aims for Zero Waste
OAKLAND, Calif. -- In a little over a year, Hollander Home Fashions plans to send zero waste to landfills. The largest pillow manufacturer in the U.S. has set 2010 as its zero waste deadline, and is well on its way to meeting that goal, having found recycling streams for much of its trash.
Hollander, which sells over 35 million pillows a year through most major retailers, has been developing its zero waste program for the past 18 months. "We took a look at everything we were throwing out, and we wanted to target the big things first," said Ron Capranos, senior vice president of manufacturing and head of Hollander's sustainability efforts.
One of its biggest wastes is plastic wrapping from fiber bales. The company buys millions of pounds of fiber a year and estimated it was putting 250,000 pounds of wrapping in landfills annually. Now all of its U.S. and Canadian manufacturing sites sell that wrapping to recyclers, but it wasn't easy. Capranos said the biggest hurdle was finding companies in different states that would pay for the wrapping. Hollander still doesn't have a buyer for wrapping from its Chicago location, but that wrapping is for now being sold to a company buying wrapping from Hollander's Pennsylvania location.
Hollander also recycles corrugate, bottles, paper, machine oil, used electronics, scrap metal, wood pallets and other items. "We're making a concentrated effort to make sure nothing goes into landfills," Capranos said. Some waste it still going to the trash though. For instance, after pillows are filled, a small amount of fabric is trimmed off of the ends, and Hollander currently has nowhere to send that fabric but the trash.
Along with making money from selling waste to recyclers, the company has seen its disposal costs go down to about 38 percent less than last year.
Hollander's zero waste goal goes beyond just finding a place other than landfill for trash. The company partnered with the Packaging Corporation of America to examine how to redesign its packaging to cut down on materials and make trucking more efficient. With a few tweaks to its packaging like moving box openings to smaller sides (so that the flaps are made of less material) and resizing boxes, the company estimates it's cutting out 4.2 million square feet of corrugate and using 2.3 million less cubic feet of shipping space annually.
The company is also providing an end use for recycled materials, integrating fibers made with recycled plastic bottles into pillows. With some pillows containing up to 80 percent bottle-based fibers, Hollander estimates it's using about 12 million pounds of bottles a year.
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What about end of life, closing loop?
If the average american replaces their pillow every few years, finding a way to recycle the 35 million pillows being thrown into landfills every time a new Hollander pillow is bought would be the real challenge. I don't understand why every pillow needs its own new box? Why not use bulk returnable toters to ship pillows to retailers with something like a polyethylene cover (which most seem to have anyway).
Another big improvement would be to design a pillow with a longer rated useful life, so landfills wouldn't be filled up so quickly with excess plastic stuffing.
Closing the loop sustainably involves thinking through the product lifecycle completely and working to improve the whole thing.
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