CASE STUDY No. 9614
KEY WORDS TV PICTURE TUBES, GLASS REUSE, LEADED GLASS DUST,
FUNNEL GLASS FINES
Thomson Consumer Electronics, Inc.
10330 N. Meridian Street
Indianapolis, IN 46290
Contact: Ted Wagner, Manager, Environmental, Health & Safety. Tel: 317-587-5257
Summary
By recovering and reusing waste glass from the TV tube manufacturing process, the company has substantially reduced its raw material and waste disposal costs. Background in 1991, Thomson began to instill the philosophy of reduce, reuse, recycle throughout the organization. This program, along with the company Environmental, Health and Safety Charter developed shortly thereafter, has established pollution prevention, waste minimization, recycling, and protection of resources as core values.
The company manufactures and distributes more than 3 million TV sets a year. Most of the picture tubes are manufactured at a Thomson plant in Circleville, Ohio, but every company site that involves tube glass is part of the glass recovery system. Circleville depends heavily on reclaimed glass to furnish cullet for production of tubes. The principal sources of scrap glass are rejects, broken tubes, and fine particles of glass produced in the finish-grinding process.
Payback
In 1994, approximately 3.2 million pounds of glass was recovered, resulting in an estimated $240,000 raw materials savings and a $320,000 avoided hazardous waste disposal cost. At the Circleville plant, glass fines from grinding processes are recovered in a water slurry and reintroduced into the manufacturing process. In 1994, approximately 1.64 million pounds of glass fines were recovered, resulting in approximately $163,000 of raw material savings and $160,000 in avoided hazardous waste disposal costs. Lead-containing dust is captured by an electrostatic precipitator. The company estimates that more than 615 tons of lead-containing dust was captured and reintroduced into the manufacturing process in 1994, resulting in raw material savings of $350,000 and avoided hazardous disposal costs of $150,000
The net savings from all waste prevention programs are $6.3 million per year, the company reports. Because various internal costs have not been charged back to each waste prevention program, savings attributable specifically to the TV tube glass recovery program cannot be calculated .
Other savings
The company's investments in TV tube production methods are only part of a general
program to reduce costs by reducing waste. For example, Thomson also is recovering the
copper from 2.2 million pounds of cupric chloride generated annually during manufacture of
circuit boards. The copper is sold as a micronutrient in animal feed. Thomson also has
perfected a process to bind harmful lead particles within waste treatment filter cake,
rendering the filter cake nonhazardous and safe for disposal in a solid waste landfill.
This greatly reduces disposal expense compared to handling of the material as hazardous
waste.