Waste Reduction Awards Program (WRAP): Smucker Quality Beverages, Inc.

WRAP Award Winner: 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000

• Summary
• General Information
• Recycling Efforts
• Reuse Efforts
• Food Waste
• Environmentally Preferred Purchasing

Summary

Smucker Quality Beverages (SQB) makes, bottles, and distributes about 10 million gallons a year of juices and other beverages at its 200,000 square foot plant and warehouse in Chico. SQB has been recycling since it bought the Chico facility in 1977. Starting with "the money makers" cardboard and glass, the company expanded its efforts after AB 939 passed in 1989. Today, SQB recycles, reuses, or composts about 95 percent of its waste steam, according to production manager Bob Wagner, who has been instrumental in this effort.

In 2005, SQB saved $140,872 in avoided waste hauling and disposal costs. They received $40,665 from selling their recyclable materials; they do not have to pay for collection or shipping of these materials. Materials include approximately 104 tons of cardboard, 199 tons of glass, 173 tons of metals, 40 tons of plastics (including PET bottles and shrink/stretch wrap), 3 tons of aluminum cans, 13 tons of office paper and magazines, and 2680 tons of fruit pulp. All but the fruit pulp are bailed on site, one of the activities on the half-acre area devoted to recycling and re-use.

SQB has just contracted to have its aseptic packaging and fruit juice-laden thick plastic bags recycled. Its hazardous materials are recycled, not just stored. This includes batteries, fluorescent light bulbs, parts cleaner, and acetone. Broken wood pallets are sold to a local company for refurbishing or sale as firewood. Apple pulp goes to a local farmer for use as cattle feed; pear and cherry pulp is used by the same farmer for animal bedding or sold by him for co-generation. Residues from tea production go to the Earthworm Soil Factory for vermicomposting.

About a third of the used 14,400 55-gallon metal drums that SQB disposes of annually are sold to local honey farmers or other businesses; the rest are crushed and recycled along with other scrap metal. Printer cartridges are recycled. Old computers or other working electronic equipment are donated to employees or recycled.

In 2005, SQB hired an on-staff waste management coordinator to oversee the recycling-reused operation and work with employees to make sure that recyclables do not end up in the trash.

SQB utilizes used furniture in its office. Their old New England-style hydraulic rack-and-cloth press was donated to a local recycling company which makes rubber matting out of used tires. SQB practices waste prevention by having systems to reduce waste on the production line and being prudent about spending.

In terms of environmentally preferred purchasing, 90 percent of the fruit SQB buys is organic. Typical for the industry, their glass bottles have recycled content as do their cardboard boxers. In 1995, SQB stopped buying Styrofoam cups and purchased a dishwasher and gave employees their own ceramic cups.

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General Information

A wholly owned subsidiary of The J.M. Smucker Company, SQB makes, bottles, and distributes juices, juice blends, and teas at its 200,000 square foot plant and warehouse in Chico.

The facility, which sits on 32 acres, was purchased and modified by Knudsen & Sons, Inc. in 1977 for their juice making and bottling operation. Knudsen started making and bottling juices in 1963 as a backyard operation in Paradise, a small town near Chico.

The J.M. Smucker Company bought Knudsen in 1984 and continues to sell the R.W. Knudsen label along with Simply Nutritious and Natural Brew. In 1990, Santa Cruz Organic was purchased; that label is also made at the Chico plant. Annually, the plant bottles about 10 million gallons of carbonated and non-carbonated juices and other beverages.

WRAP interviewed Production Manager Bob Wagner in February, 2006. Wagner was hired by Knudsen as a mechanic in 1977 to work on the Chico plant. When the facility was finished, he became the plant’s first production manager. Wagner has been instrumental in developing the recycling program.

SQB employs about 135 full time employees who work out of the Chico facility; there are another 40 sales and distribution representatives who work out of other locations. About 90 percent of the employees live in Chico and the rest commute more than 20 miles to work. About 10 employees ride bikes or use public transportation; about 20 carpool and the rest drive their own cars.

Recycling Efforts

Overview

The non-hazardous items in the SQB waste stream which are currently recycled include cardboard, glass, plastic (PET) bottles, aluminum cans, plastic (PET) strapping, office paper, magazines, plastic (HDPE) pails; shrink/stretch wrap, scrap metals, 55-gallon metal drums; thick plastic bags, and aseptic packaging. All these materials are collected and bailed on site.

SQB gets a monthly quote on prices from Waste Management (Chico) and Smurfit and Stone (Sacramento), explained Wagner. They then sell a truck load of mixed bales to the one with the best price. Both companies cover the hauling and sell the materials to other vendors for actual recycling. The bales are placed on seconds pallets that would not be used for shipping out bottle juices; see pallets below.

SQB has just arranged with Waste Management to collect the 50 tons of used aseptic juice concentrate bags and the 50 tons of 2.5 mil LDPE plastic bags used to catch leaks from the 55-gallon drums. Because both items were contaminated with fruit juice, it was difficult to find a recycler to take them. These two items currently make up over half of the 191 tons that SQB has been sending to the landfill.

The metal drums make up about 90 percent of SQB’s metal; the rest is mostly scrap metal from machine repairs and caps from the bottling. Metals are collected by Steelmill Supply, located in Durham, in a 20-yard bin that it supplies. Steelmill does not charge for collecting the metal, but also does not give SQB money for the material. The metal bin is collected on an average of twice a month, explained Wagner; when full it weighs 10 tons.

SQB contracts with Safety-Kleen, a company based in Texas, to recycle the materials they have that are classified as hazardous, including batteries, fluorescent light bulbs, parts cleaner, and acetone. Safety-Kleen provides SQB with the containers to collect and ship the material.

SQB’s contract is for the materials to be recycled, explained Wagner, not just stored safely. Mercury gas, glass, and metals are extracted from the light bulbs and chemicals and metals from the batteries. The petroleum-based parts cleaner is filtered to remove dirt and sent back to SQB for reuse. Safety-Kleen burns the acetone to heat the kiln in its cement making plant.

Other items diverted from the waste stream through composting, reuse, or a mixture of reuse and recycling include wood pallets, fruit pulp, tea mixture residuals, 55-gallon metal drums, and used printer cartridges. Old computers or other working electronic equipment are donated to employees or are taken by Safety-Kleen. See above.

Non-diverted waste items include paper towels, employee lunch room waste, miscellaneous plastics & metals, contaminated plastics and cardboard, plastic weave bags that their sugar is shipped in, and floor sweepings. These go into go into a 30-yard compactor which is collected by Waste Management every 4-6 weeks on an on-call basis. Wagner noted that the collection frequency varies with the plant’s output. There are also recyclables that end up in the trash, notes Wagner, something they are constantly working to minimize.

In 2005, Wagner reported that SQB had diverted about 95 percent of waste stream which saved about $140,872 in avoided waste hauling and disposal costs, reducing the overall waste bill to $10,261. Recycled materials included approximately 199 tons of glass, 104 tons of cardboard, 173 tons of metals, 40 tons of plastics, 3 tons of aluminum cans, 13 tons of office paper and magazines, and 2680 tons of fruit pulp (see Food Waste, below). SQB received about $40,665 from sale of the recycled products.

Basics

Recycling had started at the facility when it was still owned by Knudson & Sons, Inc. "We were recycling the revenue makers, cardboard and aluminum" noted Wagner. In the early 80s they began recycling glass. In early 2000, SQB started recycling their PET bottles and another now-discontinued line of HDPE bottles, both revenue generators.

Aluminum cans, like glass and plastic bottles, enter the waste stream from the bottling process or are brought in by employees. Approximately 80 percent of the beverages go into glass bottles, 10 percent into plastic and 10 percent to aluminum cans. As these bottles and cans go through the automated machinery to be labeled and filled, any that are mechanically rejected are recycled. Occasionally, filled bottles may have labels that are crooked or not adhering properly; these go into the company store where they are sold at a significant discount to employees. Cans are pre-labeled. Product seconds are sold to employees at a discount, so they are not wasted.

The plant has two bottling lines, one for carbonated (aluminum and glass) and one for non-carbonated (glass and plastic). Only one type of beverage is filled at a time on each line; when the type of beverage is changed, unfilled bottles or cans still in the machine are removed and recycled.

Increasing Recycling Efforts post AB 939

After the passage of AB 939 in 1989, "the company took the steps to say they needed to do all they could at the plant to recycle," explained Wagner. This included both expanding the types of items that could be diverted and in making sure that all divertible material was in fact being diverted (and not ending up in the trash).

One of the things they learned early on, explained Wagner, was that they needed a bailer so that they could make their recycling efforts cost effective. They calculated the bailer would pay for itself within two years, so they bought one in the early 1990s. It actually paid for itself within 18 months from the higher prices they received for the compacted material and the reduced freight costs (because they were able to pack more into one truck load, so fewer loads were needed.)

With the bailer, they were able to double the price they were getting for their cardboard and also able to get a better price on the aluminum and PET bottles. Wagner noted that they get a price per pound on these items rather than the California redemption value. The beverage containers generated through the filling process would not qualify for CA redemption. They do lose a little bit on not getting redemption value for the containers than employees bring in, but it is not enough to make it worth separating these out.

SQB’s hauler also provided 20-yard containers which enabled them to separate the more valuable white paper from mixed office papers (color paper, manila envelopes, file folders, and magazines), again resulting in a higher return.

In 1996, SQB started recycling the plastic strapping and shrink/stretch wrap used for securing the empty bottles shipped to them on pallets. Without a bailer, these materials could only be packed loosely in a container, so the amount received for the materials did not offset the cost of hauling them. Bailer-compacted materials are 8 to 10 times heavier than uncompacted ones, so a compacted bin is worth hauling.

In addition to having a bailer, SQB also has the yard space, about half an acre, to store recyclables while it assembles enough material to make compacted loads. As an example, Wagner explained that it takes fourteen 1-yard bins of plastic strapping to make one bale which would then go on the truck. If they did not have room to store the 14 bins, they would not be able to cost effectively recycle the strapping.

Getting to 100 Percent

"In 1990, we were diverting about 70 percent of what could be diverted," explained Wagner, "by 1995, we were at 80 percent and ten years later, we were at about 92 percent. But we wanted to do more."

"In January 2005, we came to a meeting of the minds about our recycling efforts. We realized that in order to have a good program, it needed to be embed it into employees. We did a big push to get workers to put the recyclables into the right containers, not to put them in the trash. Procedures are the key. And it worked, we really got the recycling rate up."

At this same time, SQB decided that recycling was so important, it was "worth a wage", noted Wagner. So they hired a person to do the recycling. SQB’s Waste Management Coordinator spends about 90 percent of his time on recycling and about 10 percent on other duties. This helps to make up for the fact that other people, like Wagner, spend part of their time on recycling.

Having the coordinator on board has enabled SQB to carefully monitor what goes into the trash. Trash is collected by plant area and then checked regularly by the coordinator. If he finds recyclables in the trash, he goes directly to the people who work in the area it came from. For example, Wagner explained, they might find out that the night shift threw out plastic wrap, so they can go to that crew and get them back on board with recycling. Through this immediate feedback, bad habits don’t get started and the importance of recycling is reinforced.

"A company has to be dedicated to recycling to devote resources to it, " explains Wagner, "but it also has to be worth the money in terms of savings from avoided disposal costs. We have to look at this as a money maker. When you live in California, everyone has a vested interest in doing their part to reduce waste. Yes, we want to do our part and our customers want us to do our part, but we can’t stay in business if this does not make economic sense."

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Reuse Efforts

Pallets

Like many companies, wood pallets that come with received goods are used again to ship out goods. SQB uses a standard Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) pallet. They reuse these pallets as long as they are intact. However, if they get broken, they are collected biweekly by Chico Pallet Recycling with whom SQB has contracted. That company buys the broken pallets for $2 each.

Chico Pallet takes the pallets back to their lot and repairs them if possible for resale. If the pallets can be fixed to the GMA specifications (using hard woods for whole board repairs, no plates) SQB will buy them back. Pallets which are repaired but not to GMA standards are sold as seconds to other vendors; SQB does not use seconds.

Chico Pallet cuts up the scrap wood from the broken pallets and sells it as kindling. They also collect the sawdust and sell it for animal bedding.

Metal Drums

Monthly, SQB buys about 1200 55-gallon metal drums containing fruit concentrate. About 30 percent of the empty drums are sold to local honey farmers and other businesses for reuse. SQB can store a month’s worth of drums, but when they get more than this, they crush them with the baler and put them into the metal bin for recycling.

Old Equipment

When SQB replaced their old New England-style hydraulic rack-and-cloth presses with a new press in 2002, the old press was given to Van Duerr Industries, Inc., a local company that recycles used tires. In 2002, Van Duerr was awarded a $370,000 loan at 2.9 percent interest through the Board’s RMDZ program to purchase the equipment necessary for on-site manufacturing (the product was being made in Oregon).

Van Duerr’s feed stock is crumb rubber from 100 percent used tires from Orland and Los Angeles. Van Duerr used the presses to form the crumb rubber into rubber matting, ramps, landings for door entrance modification, and transition strips to connect different level flooring. Contact information: Tim Vander Heiden; 530-893-1596, www.safepathproducts.com

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Food Waste

Although SQB makes some beverages using only concentrate and water, about 60 percent of the plants output utilizes either fresh fruit or herbs and spices, all of which have residual wastes.

Fruit Pulp

SQB processes three types of whole fruit: apples; pears; and black cherries. The apples and pears are processed from the end of August through March. The cherries are pressed mid-May to Mid-June.

Only one fruit is processed at a time. The fruits are off-loaded mechanically from delivery trucks into an outside machine bin where they are put through a power washer that knocks off any bruises or other soft spots. The fruit is then visually inspected as it moves through a stainless steel auger into a disintegrator where it is pureed. The discarded parts are added to other food residues which are hauled for composting (see below).

Organic rice hulls, a by-product of near-by Lundberg Family Farms, are added to the puree as a press aid explained Wagner. Press aids are commonly used to absorb the excess liquid, making the mixture thicker and more consistent so that the press has more bulk to press against, increasing the yield of juice. Without a press aid, the excess liquid would leak out before it could be pressed.

Wagner explained that they always use organic rice hulls, even if not all of the juices are organic. This is more efficient than having to maintain two stockpiles of rice, one organic and one non-organic certified. The fruit-rice mixture is then pumped into a new $2 million computerized press which squeezes out the juice. Once the juice has been pressed out of the fruit, the remaining pulp is removed. In 2005, SQB produced 2679.3 tons of fruit pulp.

The new press made it much easier to remove the spent fruit pulp, Wagner explained. In their old press, the fruit juice was pressed through cloth with the pulp staying on top of the cloth. The cloth was then picked up by workers who would fling the pulp into a base auger. The older press took nine workers to operate, Wagner noted, and the new one takes three. With the new press, the pulp is augured from the press outside the building directly into a trailer for hauling.

When the Knudsen operation started, Russell Knudsen had a lot of land, Wagner explained. So they would load the pulp in a trailer and spread it out on the land where it would break down over time. When they moved to the new facility in Chico, they started to give it to local farmers in near-by Durham who use it for animal feed or composting.

Initially, SQB used their own trucks and trailers to haul, so it was completely free to the farmers. During the rainy season, they were sometimes not able to transport it across muddy farm roads, so they would have to landfill it. "At the most, we may have hauled to the landfill for a total of 3 months," Wagner explained.

In the mid-1980s, they made an agreement with Tony Paiva, one of the farmers who had been getting their pulp. SQBs agreed to give Paiva all the pulp as long as he would pick it up on a daily basis. Paiva starting using agricultural by-products for animal feed in the 1950s, when he would dry sugar beet tailings from a local sugar mill. He started doing this with the apple pulp; some of which he would feed to his own animals and some he would sell to other farmers. The pear and cherry pulp he would dry for animal bedding.

Paiva explained that he also collects orchard cuttings, railroad ties, and other scrap wood which he chips and sells to the Pacific Oroville Power Plant and the Wheelabrator Shasta Energy Company plant in Anderson for co-generation. A few years ago, he started selling the dry pear and cherry pulp to the plants also. Paiva has a separate contract with the co-generation plants for each of the materials he sells them.

The arrangement with Paiva relieved SQB of the expense of hauling the pulp and also ensured that none of it would be landfilled. It did not, however, generate any additional revenue. SQB did make a couple of attempts to sell the pulp, but could not find a reliable buyer, so continued the arrangement with Pavia.

Tea Residue

SQB generates residues from ginger, hibiscus, and other spices used in making bottled teas. This material was being sent to the landfill until January 2005 when SQB contacted Larry Royal of the Earthworm Soil Factory, a vermicomposting facility in Butte Valley. Wagner had originally met Royal at the CIWMB-sponsored Recycled Products Trade Show in Stockton. Although the tea residue was not an ideal material for the worm operation because of its high nitrogen content, Royal agreed to take it.

Royal started to raise earthworms in 2001 and in 2002 expanded the operation and began Earthworm Soil Factory. In 2004, Earthworm opened a new 20-acre facility near the Butte County Landfill. Earthworm was able to expand from their existing 42-acre site with a 1.9 percent CIWMB Recycling Market Development Zone (RMDZ) program for $300,000.

SQB pays Waste Management to haul the material to Earthworm, and Earthworm charges about $25/ton to take it. The tipping fee at the landfill is $27/ton. SQB sends almost 63 tons of the tea residue to Earthworm annually, so they save about $126 a year by not taking it to the landfill.

In addition to the food residue they accept from SQB, Earthworm gets yard waste from schools, commercial tree trimmers, landscape gardeners, commercial orchards, and individual households. They also get wood dust from some local wood manufacturers as well as from a plant in Rocklin. The wood dust, noted Royal, is too small to be used for co-generation. They do not accept manure.

Earthworm charges for processing to cover their handling costs, Royal explained. For clean green waste, there is no charge but if it contains debris, they charge $4/load. They charge SQB because it requires extra processing before it can be fed to the worms.

Earthworm mulches and processes the green waste it so that it can be fed to the worms through a continuous flow system. The worm castings are then harvested and mixed to make soil amendments. "Our ultimate goal is to make healthy people," Royal explained, "we start that by building the biology of the soil so that it is healthy."

Earthworm’s primary market is agriculture, as they can make blends which will help specific crops. They also sell pure castings for $8/bag and a basic mixture which backyard gardeners can buy for $45/cubic yards. (Contact information: Larry Royal, Wonderofworms@aol.com, 530-895-9676).

Juice

When bottles are not properly labeled, SQB donates them to a local homeless shelter. Several hundred cases were donated in 2005 according to the WRAP application.

Occasionally, SQB is not able to bottle all of its juice in a timely manner. When this has occurred, the juice has been sold to a Bay Area company that makes vinegar. Although they are paid for the juice, sometimes it is not enough to cover transportation, but they have sent it anyway. The alternative would be to put the juice into their onsite water treatment process.

Waste Reduction Efforts

SQB has systems to minimize waste on the production line, Wagner explained. He also noted that being prudent about spending is key to waste reduction. SQB is careful about their computers, they don’t buy new ones just to have the latest thing. Wagner has had his computer since 2000 and had the one before that since 1995.

Wagner also noted that in 1995 SQB stopped buying Styrofoam cups. It purchased a dishwasher and gave employees their own ceramic cups.

In 1984, SQB changed from receiving their bottles and cans in cardboard boxes to having them shipped in bulk. In this method, the bottles and cans are packed together with pieces of cardboard instead of whole boxes, and, as they are loaded, the pallet is turned and the shrink wrap is spiraled around the material to hold it in. Bulk shipping uses less cardboard but the same amount of shrink wrap, explained Wagner.

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Environmentally Preferred Purchasing

Office Related Products

“SQB makes environmentally preferred purchases when such products are available,” Wagner explained. “We buy the highest rate of recycled content at the best price. Currently we are getting 30 percent post consumer.” SQB has been buying recycled-content paper since 2000.

SQB gets its recycled-content copier paper through the Recycled Project Purchasing Cooperative, which Wagner learned about at one of CIWMB’s Recycled Product Trade Shows. “I met a representative from the Cooperative who was talking about how many trees could be saved by using recycled content paper,” explained Wagner. “I went home and looked at the numbers and could see for myself that this made sense.” SQB orders on line from the Cooperative, which ships out of Encinitas in southern California.

Wagner also met a representative of Pacific Copier at the Trade Show. Since then, SQB has been buying recycled printer cartridges and toners from Pacific Copier. These are shipped directly to SQB from Sacramento.

SQB has reused furniture from other plants and used cabinets they have bought from local sources.

Plant Operations

SQB buys rechargeable batteries for items where the batteries are changed frequently, such as air meters. But because rechargeable batteries do not hold their power as long as new non-rechargeable ones, they do not use them for items, like thermostats and clocks, which have batteries that would normally be changed only once a year.

Although they cost about twice as much, they use plastic bins for the apples rather than wood. Wood bins break much more easily, so do not last as long.

Bottling, Shipping

SQB buys recycled content glass bottles from California, Washington and Wisconsin, explained Pete Samuel, who coordinates the purchasing of packaging. The bottles are approximately 33 percent post-consumer and 10 percent pre-consumer.

Typical for most businesses, the cardboard boxes and trays SQB uses for packaging it bottles have recycled content. Purchased in California, the boxes average 3 percent pre- and 90 percent post-consumer recycled content, Wagner notes. SQB buys their plastic bottles Washington; typical for the beverage industry, these do not have recycled content. The aluminum cans come from California.

SQB has experimented with recycled content bottle labels, Wagner explained, but has not yet found labels that will work. They tried 100 percent recycled-content labels but these would not adhere well, so they went to 50 percent and were still having problems with these going through the machinery to be put on the bottle. “We would have loved to have recycled content labels, but you can only do what your machinery will let you do,” explained Wagner. “So we’ll keep looking.”

Ongoing Efforts to Buy Recycled

“We go out of their way to find recycled content” explained Wagner. “We would rather use see products made from recycled resources. If we can get the quality, we will try to go to the highest rate of recycled content.”

This has been challenging at times. Wagner reported complaints from people about paper towels that had a high recycled content but ripped very easily. People had also registered complaints about different recycled-content toilet papers they had tried. “You have to find a happy medium between trying to support recycled products keeping people happy, and keeping control of your costs."

Wagner is also mindful of costs, “we have our part to do, but we also have to stay in business.” They bought picnic table of recycled plastic even though it was much more expensive than a wood table would have been. However, they passed on paying the high premium for recycled-content plastic recycling containers.

Buying Organic, Buying Locally

Part of SQB’s environmentally preferred purchasing is of organic fruits, explains Kim Deitz, the Regulatory Compliance Manager. Ninety percent of the whole fruits they buy are organic, although only about 25 percent of the beverages they make are organic. Dietz served for five years as SQB’s representative to the National Organic Standards Board, which sets standards for what types of organic pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers will be allowed under the organic certified label. Dietz also noted that from an industry standpoint, organic production and processed foods are growing with organic apple being the largest selling organic fruit juice.

About 30 percent of the plant’s output is apple juice made from California, Arizona or Washington apples that are pressed at the facility. Whole pears from Washington and California and cherries from California are also pressed for juice, making up about 5 percent of the production. The remainder comes from juice concentrates which they buy from the U.S. west coast as well as New Zealand and other locations.

Wagner also noted the transitions in the local area, “Paradise used to be big apple country.” Also local organic farmers would rather sell produce in markets as they get a better price, he explained; juice apples do not get top dollar.

Future Plans for Energy Conservation

SQB plans to plan to start construction on a 22,000 warehouse in the next year. Their plans call for installing a 200-kilowatt solar system on the roof.

SQB is also working on plans for a 70-kilowatt methane turbine that will run on the gas from their waste water treatment. SQB currently treats all the waste water from the plant except sewage; most of the water is used for cleaning the food processing and bottling equipment. They currently burn off the methane gas that is produced by the breakdown of sugars in the water.

Wagner estimates that the combination of the solar and the methane turbine would meet about 25 percent of the site’s energy demand.

Contact Information:
Bob Wagner
Production Manager
Smucker Quality Beverages, Inc.
37 Speedway Ave
Chico, CA 95927
(530) 899-5028

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