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November 30, 2008
Waste Pro's efforts at going green are Smart – as in, Smart Car. The company's associate director of municipal marketing was asked to drive a Smart Car as his company car.
Vernon Tynes said when gas prices topped well above $4.50 a gallon, getting 41 mpg in city driving with the Mercedes-built 3-cylinder engine car was a blessing. The 48 mpg for highway driving was pretty good, too. Since it weighs so much less than typical subcompact cars that seat four or five people, the car's acceleration isn't too bad.
This might be the most visible "green effort" other than recycling programs, but it isn't the biggest.
"Recycling is really becoming a commodities market," said Waste Pro of Georgia President Fred Wood.
The price or type of commodity determines how much people really want to get into recycling. Waste Pro just purchased American Recycling, with operations in Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala., to expand its efforts. Most of the tall office buildings in downtown Atlanta are service by Waste Pro, Wood said. Companies in those buildings bring lots of paper down. By dumping it in specific boxes just for paper, Waste Pro offers a reduced hauling rate. About 5,500 tons a month are recycled now.
The company tries to take every bit of garbage it can to its recycling facility.
"The more we take to that facility, the less is going to our landfills. As we all know, the landfills continue to fill up. As they fill up, they are going to have to be moving farther out of town," Wood said.
The company has been paying about $40 per ton to dump at landfills. Taking the materials to recycle costs virtually nothing – and the company gets money back when it sells recyclables.
Saving money is important to the company's bottom line, too, as it begins to buy trucks running on natural gas.
"It probably costs us $50,000 more per truck to equip the truck ... to burn natural gas," he said.
A $1.2 million investment is planned just to set up a natural gas pumping station for Waste Pro's trucks. If that works out, other companies without the capital available might be able to use the site to fuel their trucks.
Natural gas burns very clean compared to diesel. It has been available and less expensive than diesel, helping cut some of the costs to buy a natural gas burning truck.
That's not what's important in the company's decision. More important to Wood is the calculation that for every natural gas truck bought instead of a diesel, the equivalent of 14 cars worth of pollution have been taken off the road.
It's not just out on the trucks and in the Smart Car that Waste Pro has gone green. The office uses compact fluorescent bulbs, recycles and will go paperless.
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