“In 2012 we announced that we had a goal of zero waste to landfill in our annual Sustainability Report, and we gave ourselves 10 years to get there,” explains Milton Mondardo, global lead for Sustainability Plant Efficiency at Whirlpool Corporation. The first region globally within Whirlpool that reached the zero waste to landfill goal was Latin America in 2015, where Mondardo previously worked. The team in Latin America worked with procurement to select new suppliers and with recyclers to find new state-of-the-art technologies. “We substituted processes and materials in our operations within industrial engineering, participating with product development for us to get there in terms of changing materials, changing processes and reducing generation of waste, and then eliminating the waste to landfills”, says Mondardo. Between 2012 and 2015, Latin American region had three plants reach their goal. India was the next manufacturing operation to move towards zero waste to landfill, followed by the EMEA region. Currently, eight Whirlpool Corp. sites globally claim the zero waste to landfill title. This progress has been tracked with Resource Advisor from Schneider Electric monthly since 2015, and Whirlpool Corporation’s Global Sustainability team fully expects a big jump in the number of plants reaching zero waste to landfill status this year, keeping them on-track to reach their zero waste to landfill goal for all manufacturing sites by 2022. “We are in a transition phase – explains Mondardo -. We are adopting a different approach”. A new standard from the well-known global safety standards organization UL was adopted about a year ago, which scores the plants based on the percentage of waste diverted from landfill. When using this measurement, the vast majority of Whirlpool Corporation’s plants are currently scored at the Silver Level, which means 90 percent or more of waste is diverted from landfills and incineration. “As published in our 2019 sustainability report – he adds – we have an industry leading waste recycling and waste to energy rate above 96 percent. Globally, only 3.5 percent of waste is directed to a landfill”. “Our defined commitment is to be at the Gold level minimum for all of our manufacturing plants globally by the end of 2022, and we have every expectation to hit that target”, said Mondardo.
