Recycling at Walmart
All companies can save money by reducing the amount of waste they must dispose. Walmart, owing to its size, is certainly no exception. In the United States alone, Walmart has over 4,000 stores and serves 130 million shoppers a week. You can imagine the amount of trash that accumulates on a daily basis. Many trash items, such as loose plastic, plastic hangers, office paper, and aluminum cans, are unruly and difficult to collect for recycling. To attack this problem, Walmart initiated the "super sandwich bale (SSB)" at all of its stores and clubs in the United States. The SSB is an invention of Jeff Ashby, national accounts manager for Rocky Mountain Recycling in Salt Lake City. The associates place 10 to 20 inches of cardboard at the bottom of large trash compactors. Commodities, such as loose plastic bags, aluminum cans, plastic hangers, and plastic water and soda bottles, are loaded in, and another layer of cardboard is placed on top The compactor then presses the bale into a "sandwich" with 9 to 18 inches of recyclables in the middle. The bales are then loaded onto a truck to be recycled into various raw materials that will ultimately become products once again. For ex ample, in one of its sustainability programs, Walmart directs recycled plastics and cardboard to Worldwise, a leader in developing, manufacturing, and marketing sustainable pet products, where they are transformed into a stylish and durable line of dog beds. Plastic hangers are turned into litter pans, plastic bags into litter liners, and corrugated cardboard into cat scratchers. To get a sense of the value involved, Walmart used to pay trash companies to haul more than one billion plastic hangers from its stores and clubs each year. Now, it gets paid 15 to 20 cents a pound for them. The money adds up in a hurry. Who said that reverse logistics supply chains are not profitable? It is clear that environmentally conscious supply chain operations can literally turn "trash" into "cash. "
A Walmart employee throws used packaging boxes into a compactor as a first step in building a super sandwich bale at a Cincinnati area Walmart. The giant retailer is urging its suppliers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on top of its own moves to build more energy-efficient stores, use alternative fuels for its truck fleet, and reduce packaging.