Living Our Mission to Drive Zero Waste

As published on the Pentair Blog

by Darcy Robison, Director of Environmental Health and Safety, Pentair 

As the world celebrates Earth Day 2019, we reflect on Pentair’s mission to deliver smart, sustainable solutions that empower our customers to make the most of life’s essential resource. As a large manufacturing company, we take seriously our obligation to deliver these solutions through responsible business practices that help reduce our environmental impact.

In this spirit, the Pentair Operations team adopted a new Zero Waste Model in 2018 to measure waste reduction and materials use, and we are proud to report that Pentair has a Zero Waste score of 75.6% for year-end 2018. Last year, Pentair diverted 31,284 U.S. tons of waste by reusing and recycling material. To put that into perspective, that’s three times more than the full weight of the Eiffel Tower.

Zero Waste is more ambitious than our previous “landfill free” approach as it does not allow counting incineration as waste diversion activities. The benefits of implementing a new Zero Waste system includes increasing material diversion activities through (1) minimizing waste creation in the first place; (2) if creating waste is unavoidable, look for ways to reuse back into facility processes; (3) recycling waste using third-party vendors and (4) minimizing waste at the generation point.

The Zero Waste metric requires our plants to better understand and evaluate their processes to meet the more stringent goals. Another benefit is that our manufacturing facilities are now taking a more detailed look at their disposal data to find areas where they can improve, divert, and reuse materials versus sending to landfill or using incineration options.

We look forward to sharing more about our efforts to further reduce the environmental impact of our operations in our 2018 Corporate Responsibility, and invite you to check back this summer to read more.