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Recycling Office Cites Northrop Grumman for Environmental Creativity

Posted on: Thursday, 23 March 2006, 12:00 CST

By Peter Dujardin, Daily Press, Newport News, Va.

Mar. 23--NEWPORT NEWS -- Seven tons of telephone books.

Twelve tons of tires.

Thirteen thousand tons of steel.

Northrop Grumman Newport News recycled or reused about 65,242 tons of material in 2005 equivalent to more than half the weight of the shipyard's main product, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.

The City of Newport News recently chose the shipyard, Hampton Roads' largest private employer, as its Business of the Year for its efforts at recycling or reusing everything from steel to paper, from concrete to cardboard.

"We're looking at a business that strives to be environmentally conscious," said Dori Brown, Newport News' recycling coordinator.

"To reach that level, you have to be pretty creative."

The creativity includes, for example, reusing thousands of metal drums the 55-gallon containers in which liquids and chemicals are delivered to the yard.

"We used to crush our empty drums and take them to the landfill," said Hogie Thorn, the yard's manager of environmental programs. "Now we wash them and then reuse them here at the yard."

They become garbage cans or containers that hold various solid materials.

It only makes sense that steel so important a component of ship construction is a big part of the yard's recycling efforts. The yard began steel-recycling efforts 100 years ago, the yard said, by melting and reusing scrap steel.

Large pieces of scrap steel that the yard can reuse are sent to a field at the yard for future use. Smaller pieces of steel are sold to other companies and scrapped.

In 1990, the yard began a program that encouraged the recycling of metal drums, asphalt and other materials.

The yard reuses the tiny steel pellets blasted at ships before painting to create roughness on the surface to help the paint stick. The yard uses those pellets not once but 20 times, said Bob Gunter, the yard's senior vice president of operations.

The company also recycles telephone directories to the tune of 7 tons a year. At 3.5 pounds apiece, that's about 4,000 books a year.

Staging sections, the planks of wood that workers stand on during construction, are also salvaged. They're sent to a yard division that sells the parts.

Over the past 10 years, the yard has recycled or reused an annual average of 45,000 tons of material, Brown said.

In 2005, the 65,242-ton figure included 28,000 tons of soil that the yard unearthed to build foundations for various buildings. That dirt was sold to companies that needed soil.

The recycling effort, Gunter said, is good for the community but also good for the company's bottom line.

The steel-recycling program, for example, is estimated to have saved the yard about $3 million a year.

"We do this because it's the right thing but also because it pays," he said. "Using these scraps and remnants just makes sense for us."

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Copyright (c) 2006, Daily Press, Newport News, Va.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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NOC,

Source: Daily Press

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