Hearthside operating strategies incorporate long-term sustainability, increased recycling, reduced waste and lower energy usage.
As a world-class manufacturing environment, sustainability is integrated into our production and supply chain processes. Our year over year facility investments enable us to continue driving superior operating efficiency and greener outcomes.
ON-SITE GREEN CHAMPION
In addition to network, plant and departmental initiatives, each location also has a “Green Champion”. This individual measures the facility on a number of key sustainability metrics, including total waste, recycling volume, water usage, electric consumption, air volume, and natural gas consumption. All this data is tracked on a network-wide basis. Sustainability performance is measured and rewarded in at Hearthside.
As of Q3 2016, Hearthside has 29 active GREEN programs underway. Run by each plant’s Green Team, these projects employ CI best practices to benchmark, improve and measure the progress of each program. Successful initiatives are replicated across the Hearthside network. New learnings from those replications are applied as part of our ongoing CI program.
ANNUAL SUSTAINABILITY RESULTS
The roll-up of our network’s annual sustainability results includes over 132 million gallons of water, 1.16 million pounds of airborne particulates, fiber equivalent to saving 328,000 trees, 65,000 pounds from landfills, 81.5 million kilowatts of electricity, and 7.92 million gallons of fuel.
LIGHTING
Each year since forming the company, Hearthside has invested in more LED lighting technology. From production environments to employee parking lots, we continue to save resources while creating superior working environments. Each LED deployment generates cleaner, brighter light at an average 80% reduction in energy consumption.
ZERO-LANDFILL
At Hearthside, we are making Zero Landfill a reality as we drive for towards a zero-landfill network. As of today, five of Hearthside’s facilities have already achieved Zero Landfill status; all other facilities have also posted reduced year over year waste. Leveraging our continuous improvement practices, we constantly seek new and more creative ways to reduce waste. in 2015 we drove down overall waste by another 1.7%.
EXAMPLE: IT’S ONLY A WATER BOTTLE
Water bottles can add up fast. One plant drove the water bottle reduction effort. Some locations were wasting money on bottled water and creating unnecessary plastic bottle waste. The simple solution: Water Bottle Filling Stations. In year one the first unit saved over 48,000 potential water bottles from ending up in landfills. It also saved many thousands of dollars, providing a near-instant ROI. Win-Win-Win.
LARGE AND SMALL EFFORTS
As a contract manufacturer, Hearthside does not have the luxury of boutique sustainability endeavors. Each project must deliver tangible sustainability results while protecting efficiency, quality, and safety benchmarks.
We believe sustainability can be neither achieved nor sustained with silver bullet thinking. Lasting results require day-over-day focus, continuous improvement practices, and impartial measurement.
TRANSPARENCY
When customers visit our facilities, they see our sustainability, quality, and safety progress on our boards. Tracked constantly and updated daily, these metrics enable everyone in our continuous improvement culture to know exactly where they are relative to the sustainability goals we have established.
