We know we’re a few days early. Earth Day is Friday, April 22nd …but we couldn’t wait to share the great news about our recycling efforts.

At Mansfield Plumbing, the quantity of recycled materials is impressive. Ten million pounds of fired scrap, 10 million pounds of spent plaster molds, 330,000 pounds of cardboard and cartons, 8,900 pounds of paper, 3,000 pounds of plastic and 6,000 wooden pallets.

“We recycle 100 percent of our fired scrap and spent plaster mold material, which is about 10,000 tons of material each year,” says Ed Tinoco, P.E., environmental engineer at Mansfield Plumbing in Perrysville, Ohio.  “Instead of going into landfills, this material is used as road aggregate that actually leads up to landfill areas.”

In addition to the massive amount of fired scrap and spent plaster, Mansfield Plumbing recycles 330,000 pounds each year of cardboard and cartons that are sorted, cleaned and sold to paper mills that use the reprocessed material by manufacturing it into a variety of paper products. Six thousand unusable wooden pallets are either refurbished or made into mulch material. And, 3,000 pounds of plastic, 8,900 pounds of paper and 520 pounds of aluminum cans are also recycled yearly. Finally, the company has initiated a water conservation program designed to reduce water usage by 10 to 30 percent at its manufacturing facility.

            “Our efforts don’t stop with just the hard materials you can physically see in our plant,” says Tinoco. “We actually recycle energy. Waste heat from our kilns is recovered and used in both the drying process of our sanitaryware and to heat our water for factory operations.

“Additionally, we’ve reduced the natural gas needed to operate our plant. We estimate our gas consumption to be about 10 percent below the industry standard on a per pound measurement. We also undertook a lighting project in 2008 that has helped us save about 50 percent of the energy over our previous lighting system.”