Green manufacturing: innovative design, improved processes and recycling efforts in Indiana.

• Author: Hromadka, Erik
• Position: Cover story - Company overview

TWENTY YEARS AGO, the first joint venture between two Japanese automotive companies completed a new manufacturing facility in Lafayette, replacing green cornfields with a plant that would produce more than 2 million Subaru and Isuzu vehicles. However, few would have guessed that the site would also become a symbol of "green manufacturing" in the United States.

Indeed, with all the emphasis on "green" products and lifestyles that seek to help the environment, Indiana's heavy manufacturing industries would seem to be an unlikely place to find such efforts. However, Subaru of Indiana Automotive and a growing number of other manufacturers across the state have been seeing green as a way to both help the planet and improve their bottom lines.

Subaru's Lafayette plant, which manufactures the Outback, Legacy and Tribeca vehicles, has been a pioneer in reducing waste and recycling materials. In 1998, it became the first auto assembly plant in the U.S. to receive an ISO 14001 certification, meeting the international standard for implementing an environmental management system. Similar to quality management systems, the program establishes procedures to identify, document and improve the environmental aspects of a company's activities and is reviewed by third-party organizations.

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The facility became the first auto assembly plant in the nation with an on-site solvent recovery system in 2002. The next year, its 832-acre campus was designated an official backyard wildlife habitat and has been home to a wide range of animals, including deer, coyotes, beaver and blue heron.

Then the Lafayette operation set out to become the first auto assembly plenty to achieve zero-landfill status, a goal it achieved in 2004. Now Subaru says 99.8 percent of the plant's refuse is recycled, reused or sent to an Indianapolis waste-to-energy plant instead of being sent to landfills.

"The average household in America sends more to a landfill every day than our entire Subaru manufacturing plant," says senior vice president Tom Easterday.

So how did Subaru's Lafayette operations achieve its environmental milestones?

It starts with leadership from the top of the organization, such as the company's decision to achieve zero-landfill status, and is then supported by the 1,300 individuals who work at the facility; explains Brent Lank, an associate in Subaru's Corporate Planning Department.

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That support resulted in a massive effort to recycle everything that wasn't shipped out on the new vehicles that come off the assembly line every two minutes, after winding their way around the plant for approximately 17 hours. From obvious recyclables such as steel, glass and wood pallets to various types of packaging materials, plastic caps and coverings for engine parts and even the metal slag left over from robotic welding operations, the plant seeks to recycle everything,

"If it's not going on the vehicle, you have to manage it somehow," Lank says. "A lot of the ideas came from associates who asked, 'why aren't we recycling this?'"

Those efforts have paid off and in 2007 the plant recycled 13,142 tons of steel, 1,448 tons of cardboard and paper, 194 tons of plastics, 10 tons of solvent-soaked rags and four tons of light...