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By Joe Boomgaard | TBL
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Haworth’s Bill Gurn and WMU’s Dave Meade stand in front of a collection of scrap powder paint at Haworth. The powder is held in the company’s recycling center before it is all recycled. Even large-scale users like Haworth have difficulty recycling powder paint, but a new offshoot group from WMU’s Green Manufacturing Industrial Council hopes to find new opportunities for reuse so powder paint waste doesn’t end up in a landfill. PHOTO: JOE BOOMGAARD

WEST MICHIGAN — Manufacturers that have powder paint operations have long struggled with what to do with the 40-50 percent of the powder that gets wasted in normal applications.

Many companies, particularly in the office furniture and automotive industries, made the switch from wet coating to powder coating as a way to cut emissions, but even powder coating still has a significant waste stream. The best powder coaters in the industry may achieve only about 75 percent utilization of the powder paint they’re buying for $2-$4 per pound. The average coaters might have 50-60 percent of the powder actually be used.

“Upwards of 50 percent of this material that they purchased ends up in the waste stream,” said David Meade, associate director of the Green Manufacturing Industrial Consortium (GMIC) and professor of manufacturing engineering at Western Michigan University. “That’s a significant portion, and it’s created a huge pool (of waste material), and the region is not able to absorb it all. The current solution is the landfill. Powder doesn’t leach and it doesn’t need to go to an industrial landfill, so that’s the easiest solution.”

Increasingly, OEMs are demanding that suppliers disclose more information about their processes and materials that contribute to finished products. The data can be important for product certifications and for accounting for waste streams.

In West Michigan alone, companies are sending what’s estimated to be millions of pounds of scrap powder paint to the landfill each year, but office furniture manufacturer Haworth Inc. isn’t one of them. As MiBiz reported in June 2010, Haworth sends zero waste to the landfill, although it does send some remaining items to a local waste-to-energy plant.

However, the company has been recycling its powder paint for about three decades, said Bill Gurn, manager of facilities maintenance. Gurn’s years of experience still have not translated into making recycling scrap powder easy. In fact, the company won’t disclose information about where it recycles its scrap powder because it sees its process as a secret for competitive reasons.

“Everyone that paints has issues and problems with powder paint. I’ve recycled some to other applications and some use it as a secondary paint, but they’re really hard to find. If you can find one, you protect it,” Gurn said. “We’ve recycled powder paint for 30 years, but it’s a load here, another load there. Sometimes you have to wait and scrounge for another place for a load to go, but it always goes to reuse.”

The issue of finding a place to reuse scrap powder can be even tougher for smaller companies that don’t produce the volume of scrap that Haworth does.

“If you’re just producing a barrel or two a day or week, there’s no place to go with it. Quantity speaks. … It’s easier for me to find a place to get rid of quantity. A lot of places you find, they want a semi load, not two barrels or nine boxes,” Gurn said, noting the office furniture industry is “small potatoes” compared to the auto industry in the use of powder paint. “Companies do put it in a landfill, but that’s tough for us because we’re landfill-free. I do move powder, but we need a place for everyone to move powder.”

The issue of finding ways to recycle scrap powder is the focus of a new cross-industry user group that spun off from WMU’s Green Manufacturing Industrial Consortium and is working with the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center and Sustainable Research Group LLC. The GMIC intentionally looked for “sticky” issues with no easy solutions for local manufacturers, Meade said. As part of the consortium, the member companies will work together to find new ways of addressing common problems and share results. No one member will own the solutions.

So while Haworth won’t share its secret, the company will work to help find new uses for the scrap powder and to broaden the base of people who do accept the waste.

“The ultimate goal of the group is to find another place to use powder. From my unselfish standpoint, my role in the group is for the betterment of the industry – not Haworth or anybody else. What we’re working on, we’re not looking to hoard that. We want to find a way that will be a benefit for all the users,” Gurn said. “For everyone to reprocess paint is good for the environment. From a business perspective, reducing waste is profitable and good for the corporation. And if we all work together and put our business objectives to the side, so to speak, we can maybe find three opportunities where we can do something with this as a group.”

Bill Stough, CEO of Sustainable Research Group, said companies from around the region have expressed interest in joining the collaboration.

“The real nucleus of the partnership is to research the alternatives and use the talent base of (WMU’s) students as an opportunity to help solve this issue,” Stough said. “As companies nationwide set zero-waste-to-landfill goals, this will become a bigger problem.”

Bill Small, west regional director for MMTC and VP of technical services at The Right Place Inc., said the collaboration is still in its infancy and is welcoming new members. The goal is to meet monthly to share information and progress.

The group has already met with a couple of companies, including one Ohio company interested in turning powder back into petroleum and an international concrete company that might be able to use the scrap as fuel to offset some of its coal usage.

“I don’t know if it’s practical,” Gurn said. “Is it the best use? I don’t know. Is it an opportunity? Maybe.”

Unintended lean consequence

The quantity of scrap powder paint can in some ways be tied to lean manufacturing practices, according to Stough.

“Ten years ago, the furniture companies were starting to get requests from interior designers for smaller runs and weird colors, but they were set up for one-color long runs. They used lean manufacturing to get the cycle times down to change colors … so they’d be able to deliver,” he said. “The unintended consequence was that every time they change colors, they generate waste when they have to clean the booths. It surprised everyone that the waste management costs went up even though they were successful to change the runs. It was an unintended waste.”

Gurn said the office furniture industry had operated like Ford Motor Company did when it offered customers the choice of any Model T as long as it was black. Now, to diversify the business and offer more customized products, the office furniture industry, like the auto industry, had to deal with more frequent changes on its paint lines.

Moreover, almost all the production runs are built to customers’ orders, so the company is not able to make long runs of product in all one color and just let them sit in a warehouse. Custom orders and shorter runs lead to more changes, and each change results in waste being generated, Gurn said.

“You try to lump as much together as possible. You don’t paint different colors if you don’t have to,” Gurn said.

• Bill Gurn demonstrates what a handful of scrap powder looks like, as well as the inherent issue of reusing the paint: its lack of a consistent color after it is purged from the paint lines. PHOTO: JOE BOOMGAARD

Small from MMTC said the scrap powder often isn’t even a single waste stream because various types of paints might have different polymers in them or even assorted metallic or plastic ingredients. Most often, companies that reuse scrap put it on non-visible parts because the conglomeration of various paints leads to an unpleasing grayish-brown color.

“The reason we brought this to the consortium is that even as hard as we work at keeping it out of a landfill, it’s still an issue. There’s no one asking for it out there. I can’t say I can take it to X, Y, or Z company anytime,” Gurn said. “It’s wasting energy in a landfill. If we really do what’s right and forget about who’s in the room and work for the betterment of sustainability and recycling, we need to share that.”

The team working on this issue also recognizes that finding a place to recycle the scrap is still an end-of-pipe issue. Ultimately, new technology will allow for higher transfer efficiencies in the paint process, Meade said.

“We may never be able to get rid of it all,” Gurn said, referring to the scrap powder generated from the process. “If one day we’re able to say we’ve made it to 80 percent efficiency, that still leaves 20 percent. And then, even if we’ve done remarkable things, what do we do with that 20 percent?” TBL

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• green manufacturing industrial consortium
• haworth
• sustainable research group
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