Turkey Hill, focuses on waste reduction as a way to both empower employees and become more sustainable. It became one of the first major ice cream or ice tea facilities to be run on 100% renewable energy.
Through various green initiatives, Turkey Hill has worked to cut down on waste, reduce packaging, and minimize outputs into the environment. From having reengineered its ice cream cartons and lids alone, Turkey Hills keeps about 210,000 pounds of plastic and 200,000 pounds of paperboard out of landfills each year. Turkey Hill has also worked hard to ensure more economic fuel usage through fleet improvements, backhauling, and local sourcing to minimize distances traveled.
Turkey Hill’s facility in Conestoga, PA, exemplifies its green initiatives. As of 2019, the facility is run on 100 percent renewable energy, consisting of 20 percent wind energy from local wind turbines and 80 percent hydropower from nearby hydroelectric dams. Turkey Hill’s wind turbines are the first commercial wind turbine project in South Central Pennsylvania and reduce the dairy’s greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 5,900 tons annually, the equivalent of removing 1,000 cars from the road. Should the dams and wind turbines not produce enough energy, Turkey Hill can purchase energy credits to make up the difference. A zero-landfill waste facility since 2015, Turkey Hill also has a landfill-gas-to-energy plant which takes the dairy’s waste gases and converts them to electricity and steam used in the production and cleaning processes. The plant saves 150,000 gallons of diesel fuel annually.
The Turkey Hill Clean Water Partnership (formed in partnership with the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay and the Maryland & Virginia Milk Producers Cooperative Association) has secured $1.5 million to help dairy producers make positive changes for clean water, and is currently working with dairy farmers to create updated conservation plans. Once the plans are implemented, the producers will receive a premium from Turkey Hill for all the milk they supply to the dairy.
Turkey Hill believes that the right renewable energy projects can be cost-efficient for companies and looks to work with energy companies and other groups to come up with cost-competitive, sustainable solutions.
‘Waste-management’ technology
Turkey Hill’s waste-reduction philosophy, in terms of employee productivity, is similar to how the company approaches production. For example, Turkey Hill began training all of its plant associates in LEAN management principles, which help eliminate non-value-adding activities and wasted time, 11 years ago, Cox said. The idea behind LEAN was to build associates’ teamwork skills and help them identify areas of waste in their day-to-day work.
Another way the company looks to reduce wasted time is by adding in new technology to help associates do their jobs better, Naff said.
“A lot of the technology we focus on is around automation,” he said. “It’s really taking manual work from our associates’ hands and giving them a tool to use to reduce wasting their day.”
In addition to automation, Naff said Turkey Hill uses tablets to augment associates’ work; the associates use them to monitor real-time line performance and equipment downtime.
Cox said it’s important to note that technology is mostly used at Turkey Hill to enhance associates’ work, not to eliminate jobs.
“It’s not that we’d never replace human effort or work or thinking with technology,” he said. “We do sometimes, but our primary strategy is to use technology to help people work better and smarter.”
Source: eesi.org
