The 3 Rs of Environmentally Friendly Manufacturing

The infamous alliteration Reduce, Reuse, Recycle reminds us how to be kind to our planet. While the buzz surrounding this phrase has seemingly died down, the effective principles for “Going Green” hold true. Being mindful of these principles as corporate values is essential to responsible and ethical manufacturing. Here are some ways we apply these principles to make manufacturing more environmentally sustainable.

Reduce

Reducing waste in manufacturing can take many different forms.

Companies can reduce the waste of fossil fuels by keeping their operations working efficiently. Yielding a higher production volume with less energy should always be a laudable goal. At Nylacarb, our Integrated Database Management System helps us to utilize our production floor effectively, ensuring we waste less time and energy. Proper planning of shipping can also help reduce waste of fossil fuels. Less, more effectively planned trips for truck drivers can have a big impact on reducing transportation pollution.

In plastic injection molding, one of the only times raw plastic materials are wasted is when an injection molding machine is purged between production runs. This is one of the reasons we encourage customers to order larger quantities to avoid the number of times the machine needs to be purged of raw material to make parts. If we get a purchase order with multiple release dates, we will often make many of these parts on the first production run and hold the parts in inventory. Again, this is to reduce the amount of plastic that is wasted when transitioning to a new project on a machine.

Reducing waste of energy, fossil fuels, and other raw materials can help make manufacturing more environmentally sustainable.