Sarah Carson
Hello, I’m Sarah Carson. I’m Rohrer’s VP of Marketing and today I’m speaking with Justin Antony, our Vice President of Operations. Hi Justin.
Justin Antony
Good morning, Sarah. How are you doing
Sarah Carson
Good. So earlier this year, you and I worked on Rohrer’s Environmental Statement and we updated our Sustainability presentation. What would you say was the impetus of that project?
Justin Antony
Yes, so really when we started off the project, looking at the sustainability and ultimately it came down to, it was the right thing to do first of all. We wanted to be good corporate citizens, really ultimately influence our employees, our customers, and all of the communities we operate in. Even if you look at our mission statement, we talk about true partners making the perfect package. And so we wanted to partner with our customers to help them achieve their sustainability goals. Ultimately, we’re committed to providing a solution to responsible manufacturing and innovation as well, that we bring to the table all the time.
Sarah Carson
Right. And I mean, there has been a huge market shift as well. Almost all of our customers are asking us to give them sustainable packaging ideas and to make recommendations for them. They’re asking us to innovate and come up with new ways to make packaging that’s both cost-effective for them, but also achieves their own corporate goals and sustainable initiatives as well. So how would you describe: what kind of programs does Rohrer have in place today?
Justin Antony
Yeah, so if I start from a manufacturing level; all of our plants have been doing this for quite a while. And today, we look to evolve some of those programs that we had put in place years ago as a foundation. All of our plants have energy efficiency programs today, they cover all of your basic things that you can think of about efficient lighting, compressed air reduction programs, controls and all of our equipment motors and pumps to ensure that they use only the energy that’s required, water conservation programs, scrap recycling programs. Also, more recently we partnered with a variety of our utility providers in looking at our overall energy usage, partnering with them on energy assessments to ultimately reduce our carbon footprint.
Overall, we continuously look at the different ways we can streamline all of our manufacturing processes to reduce our overall waste. If you look at some of our recent investments across the platform, new equipment, and also in combining some of our operations. All of that has gone into making us a more streamlined and efficient platform across the company.
I do look at some of the new equipment we put in place; a lot of those have been- we call it two-for-one swaps where we take two or more outdated pieces of technology and replace them with a newer, more efficient piece of technology. And also, that much-newer piece of technology typically produces significantly less waste, thus improving our overall waste stream as well. If I talk a little bit about some of our recent investments into our Wadsworth Ohio plant, we’re actually in process today of building a state-of-the-art recycling center so that recycling centers should be completed in the next a month or so. [This interview occurred prior to completion of the Wadsworth facility expansion.]
But at the end of it, it will be a system that allows us to segregate waste and more efficiently collect all of the paper waste and other waste that’s coming off our manufacturing equipment. Also, if I spend a quick minute talking about raw material and the different things we’ve done around raw material on the platform. Today all of our SBS board that we use on the paper side of our platform is all from responsibly managed forests. So SFI or FSC-type product; also on the plastic side, we offer a variety of options around a recycle and post-consumer recycled PET options. Also from an ink standpoint, which we’ve been doing for quite a few years now, we have soy-based inks. And if you look at all the different chemicals and things that we use in our manufacturing process, everything is a low VOC, or no VOC content really focused around that on our equipment side and on the raw material side as well.
Sarah Carson
Yeah. And we did a little bit of math around the recycling that we perform in the plan. So overall it looks like there’s about 23 million pounds of paper that we recycle every year, plus 15 million pounds of plastic recycling. And so the math that we calculated that saves almost 200,000 trees, and it also keeps about 260,000 cubic meters of landfill space that we’ve saved, based on our recycling programs. So I’m going to put something on the screen and I ask you to talk a little bit about Rohrer’s commitment to the future. So, give me a sec here. Alright, go ahead, Justin.
Justin Antony
Alright. So if we talk a little bit about environmental statement and what some of our goals are, as we work towards 2025. If you look at a lot of our customers as well they have these goals working towards 2025 and what are the different actions that they will be working on. Ultimately, we came up with a strategy that’s gonna get us to 2025 and some of our energy reduction and sustainability- a sustainability solution. So ultimately if you see some of the things that we have up there, I’ll talk about some recent short-term actions.
So, some of the recent product lines that we launched- ecoCombo™ that we launched on on Earth Day earlier this year, it’s the industry’s first post-consumer recycled content program. For the board side and the plastic side of our business. Additionally, we are in process partnering with different customers and different equipment suppliers on putting together a paper blister program which will eliminate the plastic portion of the blister package. So very neat solutions, both of which that we’re actively working on today. If you look at some of our long-term solutions, as we look at our overall process, we’re spending a lot of time around digitizing our workflows, not just in manufacturing, but also in our office processes to ultimately drive waste out of all of our processes to improve our overall carbon footprint and sustainability towards the product that we do offer. Always, we’re looking to provide options for our customers, right?
So all of the quotes, things like that, that we do provide; we plan to provide an alternative sustainable solution. Ultimately, we want to give our customers the ability to choose from a variety of options, which is why on the board and plastic side, we have these recycled products available. Ultimately you also want to help them design for sustainability. And really what I mean by design for sustainability is how do we help them reduce the materials that are used? How do we recommend material alternatives to them? How do we help them with lifecycle assessment? And then ultimately, s I mentioned some of the product lines that play directly into that as well.
Sarah Carson
Yeah, thanks, Justin. I will go ahead and put our environmental statement up on the screen too. Just to add onto what you’re saying that we’re advancing our sustainable packaging solutions. Summarizing that we’re continuously improving our manufacturing processes, and we’re working with vendors who share our values and uphold the same commitments to the environment. So, our Rohrer’s customers, prospects, our partners can learn more about our Environmental Initiatives by visiting the Sustainability page on our website or by talking with their Sales Rep. So thanks for talking with me today, Justin.
Justin Antony
Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Carson
Alright. Take care.
