Salvage team Long Beach employees find new life for used office supplies By Patrick Summers and photos by Paul Pinner This is another in a series of articles focusing on how Boeing location inside the main manufacturing building where thousands employees are making a difference in the company’s wide- of employees build C-17 Globemaster III aircraft. Supplies in high ranging commitment to environmental stewardship. demand, such as pens, pencils and staplers, are organized and Scountless pens and pencils stacked in floor-to-ceiling Site Services project administrator. “Now we’re saving money“We want employees to come here first to look for what theymade available for Long Beach employees to reuse.need before they order new office supplies,” said Joy Shneider,taples and Office Depot probably would be envious:boxes of three-ring binders, thousands of file folders and rows, all reusable office supplies sorted and made available by reducing the need to purchase supplies and helping the to employees at the Boeing Defense, Space & Security site environment by cutting the amount of trash sent to landfills.” in Long Beach, Calif. Items that employees no longer commonly use are prepared “I look at this room and just shake my head. We had no for public “salvage sales.” Supplies that can’t be reused by idea we would be able to collect and reuse so many items,” employees or sold to the public in bulk quantities are sent said Anita Bertain, Environment, Health and Safety business to recycling. Abundant reclaimed supplies, such as binders, operations specialist. also are donated by Boeing’s Global Corporate Citizenship Bertain and other employees at Long Beach who are organization to local public schools and nonprofit groups. environmentally active saw an opportunity—to recirculate office Tom Mason, Site Services manager who leads recycling supplies by collecting unneeded and surplus items in a central efforts for Long Beach, said the office supply reuse project 44 BOEING FRONTIERS / SEPTEMBER 2012
Frontiers September 2012 Issue
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