Six Star Magazine Six Star Magazine 2014 | Page 25

   Worksheet

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ame a place in Indiana where
automotive history is being made.

You are probably thinking of the famed Indianapolis Motor
Speedway, home to the legendary Indianapolis 500 - the
most prestigious event on the IndyCar racing calendar,
and one of the oldest and most famous automobile races
in the world.
But drive about an hour north of the famed brickyard
to Lafayette, Ind. and there is a place making another kind
of automotive history – the
Subaru of Indiana Automotive
(SIA) factory – Subaru’s North
American manufacturing
facility. Its assembly lines
produce the Outback, Legacy
and, starting in 2016, the
Impreza. It’s also home to an
automotive achievement that,
quite frankly, many people
thought was impossible to
accomplish.
That’s because on May 4, 2014, SIA celebrates a unique
anniversary. Ten years ago on this date it became the first
U.S. auto plant to achieve zero-landfill status – absolutely
no garbage goes into landfill. None. Zero. Zilch. For more
than a decade.
Some 99.9 per cent of the waste produced – including
a variety of different metal, wood, glass, paper and plastic
products – is recycled. The 0.01 per cent that cannot be
recycled by regulation is sent to a facility in East Liverpool, Ohio
to be incinerated at around 982 degrees C, rendered sterile,
volume reduced and put in a secure landfill. There is no energy

generated from this process. The state-of- the-art Ohio facility’s
emission controls, minimizes any possible pollution.
So how do you go from shipping literally tons of garbage
to landfill to absolutely none? “You start with the three Rs,”
says Tom Easterday, Executive Vice President at SIA. “But
not the three Rs we were taught in school. These are the
environmental three Rs – reduce, reuse and recycle.”
With the plant since it first
began production in 1989,
Easterday says, “We were
always green. Achieving
zero-landfill is just one of the
many things we’ve done right
from day one to reduce our
environmental footprint.” Take
as an example the pond in the
middle of the test track. It was
constructed along with the
plant to provide automotive
engineers with a test facility for vehicles coming off the
assembly line. Only one problem – the pond is right smack
in the middle of where the track needed to be. And it was
home to a number of blue herons who used its marshy
banks for nesting and fishing. Rather than disturb the
heron’s home (after all, they were there first) the track was
built around the pond to preserve its ecological balance.
Today the test track and the herons continue to co-exist.
That one decision made more than 25 years ago paved
the road to SIA’s environmental future.
Since then there have been a legacy of environmental

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