A Waste Case History
by Heidi Ernst
The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Va., decreased its year-to-year newsprint-waste cost by $16,000 through September 1997--$7,000 in the pressroom alone. But it's not as easy as it might seem. As John Martin, press operations and maintenance manager, stresses over and over: "Things got worse before they got better."
By instituting NAA's Newsprint Waste Management System in January 1997, says Martin, "we found that our waste was actually higher than we were recording."
Take the paper's total pressroom waste, for instance. In every month of 1996, the number hovered around 3.5 percent to 3.6 percent, the annual average. Starting in February 1997 at 4.03 percent, the numbers have steadily decreased each month, and for July, August and September, the pressroom posted 3.3 percent, 3.38 percent and 3.3 percent waste-bringing the total well under the paper's 1997 goal of 3.44 percent. One big reason: By targeting web breaks as a culprit, the pressroom team decreased the breaks from 3.75 per 100 rolls in May 1997 to 1.07 in October.
Pressroom waste is only one category of the eight in NAA's new system. The Virginian-Pilot tracks them all (even though the program is voluntary): transit, reelroom, miscellaneous, web, post-press, distribution and circulation. About 200 newspapers among 1,500 NAA members participate in the older version of the newsprint-waste system, and many don't track all categories, which makes comparing the Virginian-Pilot with other papers difficult.
Nonetheless, the paper's progress is very good, according to Frank Balentine, NAA press manager, whom Martin credits with bringing the new system to his attention. "The Virginian-Pilot is really up to speed and is a progressive paper," says Balentine, who visits papers when they request technical advisory services. "It's very well organized."
Organization is what it took to set waste goals for 1997 because the paper didn't track all categories before this year. The Virginian-Pilot's production leadership team added production waste numbers for the past two years to those that circulation and distribution posted. "We figured out from that what needed to be attacked and decided we could drop waste 10 percent easily," says Martin. Each of eight teams created at the paper--one for every waste category--decided how it could control its own excess and has pushed forward from there.
In a few of the categories, Martin's repeated message that the percentages rose before they dropped are quite evident. Some numbers came in much higher than the goals the teams set--and over the 1996 numbers in some cases--because the paper hadn't even considered certain categories before it saw the new system and therefore didn't know what to expect. But overall, total production waste has fallen steadily from 8.63 percent in February 1997 to 8.09 percent in September.
"The staff sees the numbers every week in team meetings," says Martin, "and they've been very happy with the results they're getting."
Heidi Ernst is a free-lance writer based in Flushing, N.Y. E-mail, heidi_ernst@time-inc.com; phone (212) 522-7437.