What’s the basic secret behind a paper packager’s 18% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions?

Answer: Tracking and counting them to create an in-house GHG emission baseline.

That’s the basic strategy that helped South Carolina’s Sonoco reduce its environmental footprint. It’s not a new idea, admits Sonoco’s CEO Harris DeLoach in the company’s latest Sustainability Report. But once the company decided it wanted to reduce GHG releases and improve energy and water conservation, it started measuring pollutant releases at each of its American operations.

Sonoco also put somebody in charge of the program by creating a Sonoco Sustainability Solutions (S3) team that organized all the collecting, tracking and tallying. Once they knew what and where the problems were, they could tackle them. To reduce GHG releases by 18%, Sonoco improved efficiencies at its paperboard mills.

Reducing water consumption was a classic pollution prevention project. The pollutant was the toxic ingredient in methyl violet inks (molybdenum). It worked great on packages, but it ran up huge wastewater treatment costs and triggered Clean Water Act compliance liabilities. Sonoco’s engineers designed a new process to use molybdenum-free inks, which then enabled the company to use recycled process water instead of fresh tap water.

Bottom line: Sonoco’s York, PA, plant now saves $100,000 a year in lower operating costs and is well within its permit discharge limits.

Recycling is another big success story for Sonoco. The S3 program targeted paper scrap. The company aggressively recycles scrap at its 34 plants. It’s recycling 64,000 tons of the 70,000 tons of scrap material from its various facilities. Now, instead of paying to send that to a landfill, the scrap’s reused at its plants or sold to other companies for their use. Another 28,662 tons of recyclable scrap was also diverted to reuse.

Bottom line: Thanks to the S3 recycling program, Sonoco generated $770,000 in new sales of its scrap materials.

Sonoco’s Sustainability Report is here.

Tags: greenhouse gas emissions, pollution prevention, recycling, Sonoco