Waste management

Robert Van Veen | Facilitair Manager
"Our wood compactor reduces and compacts our wood waste to such an extent that the wood transport is reduced from 1x every 10 days to ca. 6x a year. This translates into cost savings and a lower CO₂ emission."

As an active player in the metal industry, we are faced with one unavoidable fact: we create waste. And waste has a negative impact on people, animals and the environment. Litter leads to soil contamination, pollutes our water and chokes animals. So let’s collect it and dispose of it! But also separate it by sort. This means less hazardous material will be released by incineration and more can be recycled.

As we strive to improve our Corporate Social Responsibility, how we deal with waste is one important aspect to consider. That is why we are outlining our waste processing procedure in this message. Here, too, we keep raising the bar, because it’s important for each other and for our future.

"Steel, aluminium and wood are our largest waste products. We have charted their waste flows and conceived a system to stimulate the separation of waste and optimise its disposal. This results in less need for transport. We are also trying to minimise waste production as a whole, because you don’t have to dispose of what you haven’t produced in the first place."

Waste containers
Each of the nine factory halls houses recognisable containers. In the office as well, all individual wastebaskets have been replaced with centralised containers for separate waste collection.

Steel / Aluminium
At 140,000 kg per year, this is our largest waste product. We sort aluminium into four categories according to reusability. Each category has a different yield. The correct containers are placed right next to the machines that produce the waste. 

Wood
Every transport from and to our company is associated with wood waste, as it is an important packaging material. We accumulate around 65,000 kg of wood waste per year. To deal with this, we came up with an unusual solution for our industry: we purchased a compactor!

Robert added, "This compactor reduces and compacts our wood waste to such an extent that the wood transport is reduced from 1x every 10 days to ca. 6x a year. This translates into cost savings and especially a lower CO₂ emission."

"We keep taking another step forward. In the plans for the new building, for example, we are looking to realise automatic disposal of machine waste through trenches in the ground. We also recently switched to Wepapercycle coffee cups, which recycles our coffee cups into our own toilet paper. There always seems to be more that we can do with these kinds of developments!"