General Motors Chief Sustainability Officer Dane Parker likes to ask why.
That’s what he did in 2017, when he was GM’s vice president of sustainable workplaces.
While touring one of GM’s plants in South America, in search of ways to better manage plant waste, Parker noticed dozens of wooden pallets scattered around.
He asked plant managers why.
“There must be a better way to reuse some of these materials,” rather than ultimately tossing them in an incinerator, he said.
The plant workers found a way. When Parker returned a few months later, he was sitting on the pallets — literally. They had them made into new breakroom furniture.
“If you begin to be creative about it, you find solutions at all kinds of levels that can collectively change the whole,” Parker told the Free Press.
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GM will unveil its 2019 Sustainability Report on Thursday and Parker is already looking ahead at GM’s goals to change the whole. As the company’s first chief sustainability officer, appointed in January, Parker is charged with attaining the lofty goals that will make GM one of the most sustainable companies in the world. Those include running all facilities on renewable energy and making 50% of each vehicle out of reusable daily items.
“I look at sustainability in simple terms: Making decisions today so we can thrive in the future and thrive in every sense of the word — as an individual and as a full workforce, drive renewable energies and do what’s good for the planet,” Parker, who reports to Gerald Johnson, GM’s executive vice president o, Global Manufacturing, said.
Factory Zero: Detroit-Hamtramck
Parker, 52, joined GM five years ago from Dell Inc., where he helped run its global real estate, facilities and environment, health and safety areas.
He learned at a young age to care about the planet. His father was a plant geneticist; that’s basically a scientist who breeds plants to improve them or create a new variety of crops.
“I did spend a fair amount of time outside. He taught biology and botany, so I grew up understanding nature and the need to protect it,” said Parker, who grows his own vegetable and herb garden at his Shelby Township home, but laughingly says it pales in comparison to his father’s garden.
But who has time to garden when charged with meeting GM’s environmental goals that stretch beyond the company’s well-touted mission statement of a world with “zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion”? Topping GM’s ambitious to-do list:
- By 2025, GM plans for 90% of its global facilities to produce zero waste.
- By 2030, all of GM’s U.S. plants will run on renewable energy. By 2040, all of GM’s global plants will run on renewable energy.
The first goal is on track. GM started working to be landfill free many years ago, he said.
“We have over 100 sites globally that are landfill free,” Parker said. “We’re raising the bar on ourselves by not including waste that goes to incinerators. So we started from a good place and we think we’re going to make it” by 2025.
Environmentally friendly factories are on track, too. GM insiders call the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant “Factory Zero” because it will be building all zero-emissions cars by 2023, Parker said. It’s a play on words because GM insiders also dub Flint Assembly “Factory One.” It sits near the site of the Durant-Dort Carriage Company, which would eventually lead to the creation of GM in the early 1900s.
Cheap energy
By 2023, renewable energy — energy from sun and wind — will power GM’s global headquarters at the Renaissance Center in Detroit, its Tech Center in Warren, Milford Proving Grounds, GM’s Global Propulsion Center in Pontiac, Orion Assembly and Factory Zero, “formerly Detroit-Hamtramck,” Parker said.
GM will purchase 100 megawatts of solar energy to power its Spring Hill Manufacturing plant in Tennessee. GM said it will buy 500 megawatts of solar energy from DTE to support its Michigan operations. GM has already purchased 300 megawatts of wind energy from DTE and another 200 megawatts of wind energy from Consumers Energy, Parker said.
“Renewable energy is the lowest-cost sourced energy,” Parker said. “It’s a very consistently priced form of energy, too, so it allows you to plan going forward with some known costs. And it is good for the environment and the future.”
A recycled car
GM also has plans for your next vehicle that will achieve emissions gains in a nontraditional way.
By 2030, GM intends for half of the content on each of its new vehicles to be sourced from “nonvirgin” materials. That means the plastic water bottle you’re sipping on might one day be part of the glove compartment in your next Chevrolet Silverado pickup.
GM is investigating the use of bio-based materials, too. That means its future cars might also contain some materials such as cactus or algae.
It’s a tall order, requiring Parker to “roll up my sleeves” and work closely with GM’s many suppliers to make it happen. Currently, the wheel liners in many GM vehicles are recycled from 2-liter plastic bottles, among other parts on some cars, he said.
“If you think of all the plastic and metal parts on a vehicle, if that plastic can be sourced from nonvirgin sources, whether it’s recovered from the ocean or elsewhere, we can turn them into parts in a vehicle and when we’re done they will be turned into something else again,” Parker said.
He calls it a “circular economy” because all things in the world have “multiple lives” if you just keeping asking why.
“You use what’s out there, taking it out of waste streams and instead of waste it’s a resource,” Parker said. “Even the plastic caps that come on things, we turn it into a valuable product rather than see it as waste. It could be the carpet in your vehicle or part of your glove box.”
A father’s pride
To hit all its goals, Parker said GM leaders need to keeping asking why and challenging themselves to look at new ways to do things. Then, given time, they can turn it into a reality.
The pallet breakroom furniture, for example, is now being done in some of GM’s plants in Asia. Likewise, the ventilators that GM builds at its plant in Kokomo, Indiana, for Ventec Life Systems are shipped in recycled packaging, he said.
GM’s push toward environmental sustainability is inspired in part by the fact that the energy and transportation sectors are the two biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. GM, he said, wants to be part of the solution, not the problem.
Parker said his upbringing has made him ripe for the task.
“Maybe in some ways I was ahead of my time,” Parker said referring to lessons from his botanist father. “I find that many millennials today have come up with that passion and interest on their own. I’ve had employees tell me that they came to GM to be a part of the work we’re doing in sustainability.”
And, he said of his dad, “He’s very proud of what we’re doing and what several other companies are doing to create a future that supports what he loves.”
Contact Jamie L. LaReau at 313-222-2149 or jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter.
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