Mack Molding’s Headquarters Plant, along with customer BigBelly Solar® (Newton, Mass.), were named joint winners of the Global Plastics Environmental Conference (GPEC) 2010 Environmental Stewardship Award for “Enabling Technologies in Processes and Procedures.” The winning application, the BigBelly Solar Compactor, is a solar-powered compacting trash receptacle for large scale, low-cost municipal waste collection. Mack injection molds the solar bubble, fabricates the back panel and door, procures over 150 unique parts, and totally assembles the compactor and optional recycler for direct shipment to BigBelly Solar’s customers all over the world.
The state of Vermont also awarded Mack and BigBelly Solar with the Vermont Governor’s Award for Environmental Excellence & Pollution Prevention for the same product.
To illustrate its savings, Philadelphia recently replaced 700 wire-basket trash receptacles with 500 solar-powered trash compactors and 210 single-stream recycling units, all from BigBelly Solar. The city now collects five times per week (rather than 17) at an annual operating cost of approximately $720,000 (formerly $2.3 million), a 70 percent savings. Performing 17 collections each week required 33 workers on three shifts; five collections per week under the new program require only nine workers on a single shift. Philadelphia estimates saving nearly $13 million in cumulative collection costs over the next 10 years.
Both the Inman, S.C., and Statesville, N.C., facilities of Mack’s southern division received for the first time PACCAR’s prestigious Quality Achievement Award for attaining 50 PPM (parts per million) or better quality levels for plastic components they mold for Kenworth and Peterbilt trucks. PACCAR’s requirement of 50 PPM requires suppliers to minimize non-conforming parts to fewer than 50 PPM. Mack has been a preferred supplier to PACCAR since 2004, and currently delivers over 150 active part numbers to the company.
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