With 110 Landfill-Free Facilities and $1 Billion in Recycling Revenue, GM Makes a Very Good Business

As Detroit’s Iconic Renaissance Center Reaches “Landfill-Free” Achievement, Learn Why Waste Reduction has Become Big Business

The Renaissance Center in Detroit is an iconic building sitting on 14 acres, with a post office and zip code of its own. It spans 5.5 million sq. ft., houses the western hemisphere’s tallest all-hotel skyscraper, 11 other businesses, 20 restaurants and 27 retailers. It accommodates 12,000 office workers and an additional 3,000 public visitors daily.

Home to GM’s world headquarters, the RenCen, as it is known, is now landfill-free – diverting 5 million pounds of trash annually from landfills, , or the equivalent of 200,000 garbage bags. When you put one bag of trash to the curb each week, you’re sending more waste to landfill than this community on the Detroit River.

The process took more than two years and included coordination with employees, recycling partners, business tenants, and property management company, CBRE.

The RenCen is the most complex among GM’s 110 landfill-free sites to reach the milestone and is just part of GM’s ongoing efforts to help reduce its footprint and create greater environmental awareness among employees and communities where it makes and sells cars and trucks.

John Bradburn, Global Manager of Waste-Reduction Efforts for GM and a respected leader in industrial waste reduction, believes going landfill-free is good for business and how organizations can begin reducing waste throughout their operations.