Scrappy Success

Frontiers September 2015 Issue

Scrappy success Creative ideas and teamwork help Boeing improve environmental performance By Pa trick Summ ers Anne Stilts looked with satisfaction at a small mountain of foam scraps piled on a loading dock at Boeing’s factory in Renton, Wash., one of the company’s busiest production facilities. The pile came from leftover padding from thousands of packages that bring parts to the nearby 737 assembly lines. “It’s visual confirmation that we’re doing something good,” Stilts, an environmental scientist with Boeing Environment, Health & Safety, said of the new recycling project. “Because 40 Boeing Frontiers of the sheer scale of work at Boeing, even a simple idea like recycling foam can have a huge outcome.” The pile of foam exemplifies the creative ideas that are improving the environmental performance of Boeing operations, thanks to close collaboration among teams of employees throughout the company, said Beth Gilbertson, energy and resource conservation representative from the Site Services team of the Shared Services Group. “I hear a lot of ideas from Renton employees on ways we can reduce our energy and water use and solid waste,” Gilbertson said. “I’ll go over ideas with Anne and we work together to move projects forward and get things done.” Site Services maintains buildings and infrastructure and provides services, such as energy and water use management, that enable environmental stewardship throughout the company’s operations. Environment, Health & Safety, a part of Boeing’s 18,000-person Engineering, Operations & Technology team, supports conservation and waste reduction programs and provides resources that encourage employees to get involved in workplace environmental projects. The groups, and others, together drive company progress in meeting environmental targets of zero growth between 2012 and 2017 in annual greenhouse gas emissions, water intake, hazardous waste generation and solid waste sent to landfills—all while


Frontiers September 2015 Issue
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