As one of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers, General Motors (GM) operates a vast supply chain for parts and materials for its Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac brands.
In recent years, the Detroit-based company has sought out opportunities to make both its vehicles and its automaking operations more sustainable. For example, the company says it plans to eliminate tailpipe emissions from its new U.S. light-duty vehicles by 2035, and to make its global products and operations carbon neutral by 2040. And it has secured sufficient renewable energy supplies to power 100% of its U.S. sites by 2025 and to do the same globally by 2035.
That sustainability push has also led GM to seek assistance from its suppliers, including Oconomowoc, Wisconsin-based container manufacturer Orbis Corp., which is one of the market’s largest providers of reusable plastic packaging solutions. Orbis provides the refrigerator-sized, collapsible bulk containers that GM uses to transport various vehicle parts from its supply base to its assembly facilities. When they’re empty, the bins fold flat, so they can be trucked back to the factory and loaded up for another trip.
Until recently, GM had purchased containers made mainly from virgin materials. And while those containers are recyclable at the end of their life, GM wanted to do better. Specifically, the company sought to increase the recycled content of its containers, thus supporting the circular economy while also reducing waste and carbon emissions.
GOING GREEN BY GOING BLACK
At the time the project was launched, GM was already using bins with some recycled content, but only in the walls of the containers. So its first step was to task Orbis with including recycled content in the base of those bins as well.
Part of Orbis’s job was to find a color for the base of the containers that would allow for incorporating more recycled content. Because recycled plastic can easily be dyed black, that seemed the obvious choice. But the prospect of all-black bins raised concerns about whether GM’s handlers would be able to distinguish their containers from others. To address those concerns, Orbis created different-colored placards to be placed on the containers, allowing handlers across GM’s facilities to continue following their “visual management” strategy to identify containers and their contents.
The new Orbis containers have a higher quantity of recycled content compared to their predecessors, meaning they incorporate less virgin resin, and they require less fossil fuel in the manufacturing process. And crucially, the new material has proved durable, allowing the bins to be reused many times. And at the end of their useful life, the plastic can be recovered and reprocessed into new products, without ever entering the solid waste stream.
“We realized that we could help make a positive impact on the environment by incorporating recycled content into new areas of our containers,” Joseph Hilliard, supervisor, PFEP packaging and data management and GPSC–global supply chain at General Motors, said in a release. “Orbis helped us meaningfully increase the amount of recycled content in our reusable bulk containers and provided a solution to keep our container identification process running smoothly.”
Today, recycled content makes up roughly half of the weight of each bulk bin. And in the future, GM plans to convert its primary containers to all-black bins to further increase its use of recycled content.
“This is just one step toward promoting a world that is safer, better, and more sustainable,” Hilliard said in the statement. “We look forward to collaborating with Orbis in the future to further increase our supply chain sustainability, minimize waste, and have a positive environmental impact.”
