Jones and Rosy Littlefeather give bonuses to Widget workers who come up with new ways to reduce, reuse, or recycle. By reducing waste, the company helps the environment and saves money, too.
You might be wondering what a widget is. It's hard to describe, but it's really important—kinda like a doodad. Now that you know, grab a hard hat and come inside to find out more...
Laws designed to protect public health and the environment require factories, such as Widget Manufacturing Co., to reduce their contribution to air pollution as much as possible by using the latest pollution control technology.
The company uses a scrubber system to "scrub out" unwanted pollutants before releasing emissions through its smokestack. Scrubbers can remove harmful pollutants like particles, acid gases and sulfur gases. If acid gases are released into the environment, they can harm forests, soils, lakes, and living organisms, including people.
With the right kind of air pollution controls at Widget Manufacturing, everyone in Recycle City breathes a little easier.
Because metal is a non-renewable resource (when it's gone, it's gone), Rosy makes sure Widget Manufacturing buys recycled metal to produce its widgets. She buys it from the company that recycles metal items for the Recycle City Materials Recovery Facility. She also uses scrap metal that Joe's Auto Wreckers helped collect.
In trying to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals Widget Manufacturing uses, Tyrone found a safer substitute for the harmful cleanser used to clean off newly manufactured widgets. Now, Tyrone uses cleansers with ingredients like lemon juice and vinegar (which are naturally acidic). The new cleansers do the job as well as the old toxic chemicals, but they don't harm the environment.
When Rosy's crew packs widgets for shipping, they use a popcorn-like packing material made from corn starch. In the old days, they used “peanuts” made from plastic foam, but many people just threw them away (instead of reusing them) and contributed to filling up the local landfill. The new material, made from corn starch, can be dissolved in water when it's no longer needed. (Real popcorn can be used as packing material, too, but hold the butter.)
Rosy and Tyrone set up a widget repair station for fixing broken or worn-down widgets. Now, customers bring in worn widgets for replacement parts and leave with a widget that's good as new. Widget fixing not only saves energy and resources by extending the life of a widget, it also keeps customers happy.
Tyrone and a team of Widget workers experimented with several ways to reduce the packaging used to ship widgets.
Corrugated boxes are a major source of waste in industry. Willie, one of the Widget workers, found that boxes returned from customers could be reused and repackaged up to five times before recycling them. Now, Widget Manufacturing offers to pay for shipping if its customers return the packaging. So far, Willie's idea has saved the company $95,000.
With the combined efforts of Widget plants across the country, Widget workers saved 2.9 million pounds of wood by collecting wooden shipping pallets. They either returned pallets to suppliers, sold them, or repaired broken pallets so they could be used again.
Widget Manufacturing Co. encourages its employees to get to and from work in the most environmentally-responsible way. Here are some of the things that Widget Manufacturing has done to encourage this.
Bicycling to work has many benefits - like less pollution and traffic, and more exercise! Working with local bicycle advocates, Widget Manufacturing recently set up bike lockers and racks behind their building. That way nearby workers can bike to work and know their ride is safely locked up during their shift. Rosy and Tyrone are even considering offering employees a subsidy for biking to work.
Rosy and Tyrone asked Mayor Turner to include a bus stop right in front of the factory, so workers could inexpensively reach their jobs on time. City Hall quickly responded with a nearby bus stop. Workers riding the bus more than 10 miles are each responsible for emitting about 6 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - much less than the nearly 10 pounds they would release by driving their car alone.
The Widget factory office maintains a bulletin board so workers can find available carpools, locations, and times of departure to share rides to work. The factory also set up special parking areas close to the building for those who carpool.
Some distant workers have set up their own vanpool. The employees who vanpool 20 miles are each responsible for emitting only about 4 pounds of carbon dioxide instead of the 20 pounds they would put into the atmosphere by driving their car alone.
Widgets don't make themselves at the Widget factory without workers, but Rosy and Tyrone quickly realized that some of the employees in the accounting office can complete their work from home with a secure Internet connection. With careful scheduling, they can shut down the accounting office one day each week and avoid paying for all that electricity.
