How Engineering Can Eliminate Waste
Waste is inefficient. Together we discard more than 2 billion tons of waste every year—enough to fill a caravan of dump trucks that would wrap around the globe 24 times. On Earth Day – and every day – we must all do our part to stem the tides of trash.
For companies, this means using our scale and unique strengths to reduce waste in our operations, and well as in our products and packaging to avoid passing the problem onto consumers. At NI, we are test and measurement engineering leaders who love the hands-on work of solving big problems. So, it’s no surprise that our employees were recently spotted digging through our trash to measure our company’s waste!
One of NI’s Corporate Impact goals is to meet the Zero Waste standard at our owned facilities by 2030, which means diverting at least 90% of waste from landfill by recycling, composting or reusing it instead. In 2022, our diversion rate was 73% globally and above 80% at our two main manufacturing facilities in Penang, Malaysia, and Debrecen, Hungary. We’ve made great progress, but the last leg of our Zero Waste journey will require us to find creative solutions to the smaller, more stubborn problems.
To find these hidden opportunities, NI team members in Austin, Debrecen and Penang conducted comprehensive waste audits. They collected waste from each site’s recycling and compost bins. Then, they separated it into categories, and calculated the volume of each category. This auditing process helped determine our largest types of waste and identify trends and areas for improvement.
Through these efforts, we improved paper recycling rates in Debrecen and created a program to reuse wooden pallets in Penang. We restructured how we collect materials in Austin, increasing the campus waste diversion rate by 50 percent.
To help our customers avoid waste as well, we also have a goal to pursue circular design improvements in our product design, manufacturing, and packaging. Over the past year, our packaging engineering team has specifically focused on removing unwanted foam from our packaging. NI ships a high mix of products and most of these products ship in small quantities. This creates challenges for finding economical environmentally friendly solutions. So, our approach is to look at our highest-volume product shipments and conduct extensive performance testing of sustainable alternatives to foam cushions.
In 2022, we were able to eliminate unwanted foams from three types of product shipments. We converted our PXI-e shipments from a polyethylene and polyurethane foam cushioning system to a product called Korrvu?, our 4/6 slot chassis from polyethylene foam to a 100% recyclable 100% post-consumer reclaimed thermoformed plastic cushion, and our MCC USB product from foam to an all-corrugated solution.
Together these packaging innovations will remove over three semi-truck containers worth of foam from our distribution channel annually. And that is just from three products from one mid-sized B2B company. If we all do our part to reduce waste and divert waste from landfills, imagine how that around-the-world waste caravan can shrink!