When a Solution Comes

It’s a refiner’s business to know your scrap better than you do. After all, it’s your job to produce it; it’s theirs to find the usable stuff inside it and give it back. But you may be surprised at how well they know what you’re giving them—and how knowing that can alert them to problems in your operation.

Mike Gervais of Geib Refining in Warwick, Rhode Island, tells of a client who was in the habit of shipping a lot of bombing solution—the peroxide/cyanide combination used to remove firescale from castings. “We noticed that this customer was generating a large volume of this hazardous waste compared to even larger customers,” he says. “We looked at the volume of solution coming in. It was a gut feeling. When we looked at the product lines [of this customer compared to larger ones], they were very similar from company to company. So why was this smaller company generating more solution?” Geib called the client to ask how this could be happening. Because the company didn’t have an answer, the refiner was invited to come into the factory to try to figure it all out. “I went over and sat down with management and some of the production supervisors,” Gervais says. “In this kind of process, you go from the boardroom, so to speak, out to the plant, and you observe what the workers are doing. You get to see if the workers are doing what you think they’re doing.”

In this case, Gervais says, the workers had gotten off-track and were generating more solution than necessary to fire-dip the part. “We determined that there were some inconsistencies in the process,” he says. “We could see the small volume of jewelry being used with a large amount of solution. Couldn’t they do more jewelry in the same amount of solution?” The answer, Gervais says, came down to a classic manufacturing problem: a domino effect of misinformation. “What we heard was, ‘Well that’s the way Dave taught me how to do it, and he learned from Jack, and we’ve always used this amount...,’” he explains. “You can’t be on top of a worker every minute of the day. Senior management may not be looking at the hazardous waste numbers because they’re busy trying to get product out the door and run the business. Our visit to the facility allowed the senior management, production managers, and workers to rethink what they were doing. Now they’re fire-dipping more pieces using less solution.”

By combining jewelry lots, the customer was able to not only make their process more efficient, but also reduce the amount of bombing solution they were turning in to Geib—and this rather nicely lowered their associated costs. “The company recognized savings on their chemical costs and on their refining costs,” Gervais says. “Just as importantly, they were able to reduce their hazardous waste shipments. They essentially went from sending a 55-gallon drum of solution every month to shipping that same amount to us every quarter, just by changing their production processes. “Before our consultation, they were producing 110 gallons more than they needed. We charge them a set rate per gallon to process it, so they clearly recognized a savings there. They were thrilled with that.”

Again, this isn’t an unusual thing for refiners to do. It’s part of the job. “Of course we would have loved to take in more solution from them,” Gervais says. “But if you sense that something’s out of line with the rest of the industry, in good faith you have to go back to that customer and ask them why that is.”

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