Keeping it Clean – Corporate Cleveland (May, 1993)

Keeping it Clean: Taking responsibility because it’s good business and it’s free

From Corporate Cleveland
May 1993

Recycling is the name and saving money is the game, says Steve Peplin, president of Talan Products Inc., a metal-stamping plant on Cleveland’s West Side that employs 25 people and produces goods ranging from electric products to armored parts for military vehicles.

Peplin believes you have to challenge preconceived notions about improving the environment in your own workplace.

In Talan’s case, that meant taking a look at the packaging of outbound products. At one time, Peplin says, each truck that left the plant carried up to 6,000 pounds of non-recyclable cardboard packing.

“We fiddled with this thing, worked on it and have just about arrived at a combination for repackaging” Peplin says. That effort will reduce the weight of packagIng by about 75 percent without, he emphasizes, putting the cargo at any additional risk.

Peplin says environmental issues have always been a concern at the seven-year-old company, but adds that they have taken on a new emphasis of late.

“We’re young guys In our 30’s and we want to be the corporate citizens with a conscience,” he explains. “We’re the good guys.”

“It’s not that difficult and can be done easily,” Peplin says, citing as an example the simple act of opening the mail. “After sorting through the mail, take the recyclable paper and drop it in one canister, and the shiny, non-recyclable junk mail in the other,” he says. “It’s easy.”

Peplin says such efforts throw another dart at the often-held belief that being environmentally conscious is a costly proposition. “We’re saving the envIronment and saving dollars,” he says.

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