Spartanburg, SC, March 28--Milliken & Co. is one of the world's largest privately held textile and chemical companies, with more than 12,000 employees working in two dozen U.S. facilities and operations extending to 10 countries worldwide.
Despite its size, the Greenville News reports that Milliken sends less than 1 percent of its waste stream to landfills. In 2004, 36 of Milliken's domestic locations sent no waste to landfills. And Milliken has reduced its water usage by more than half since 1991.
"We are committed to strive for a goal of zero waste generation to all media -- land, air, water -- to be achieved by continual improvement in all of our operations," Roger Milliken, head of the company, said in a mission statement. "This goal will guide the conduct of our manufacturing operations, the development of new products, and interaction with our suppliers and customers. Recycling of materials is an integral part of this ongoing effort."
Milliken has won widespread environmental recognition, including being named an environmental champion by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, being a first-place winner in the reduce, reuse and recycle category by the Keep America Beautiful Foundation and being cited as having the best industry recycling program by the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.
Milliken has accumulated more than 2,000 patents and has the largest textile research center in the world; and company officials feel their products and services will continue to propel them to the forefront of the textile industry. And while company officials are proud of their track record on those environmental initiatives, they are not complacent.
"We think we're on the right track. We believe we are doing the right things for the right reasons," said John Bandy, Milliken & Co.'s environmental director. "Our performance measured any number of ways is good, but it's never going to be good enough. We're looking to improve it."
Milliken, like any other large company, generates office waste, and its manufacturing operations use materials that generate byproducts.
For example, bales of cotton used by Milliken are ultimately spun into yarn. If the cotton comes in with extraneous material, initial processing removes the material and it generally is sold for other applications, Bandy said.
"Our ultimate goal is to manufacture for our customers the products that they want and need and create an absolute minimal environmental footprint in the process of doing that. Ideally, none," he said. "We don't know how to do that yet. Nor does anyone else in the world. But we have been working on it diligently for quite some time now."
Company officials in the late 1980s put in place a computerized system to capture how much and what kind of waste and byproducts Milliken generated, Bandy said. The system began capturing the totals each month -- from textile byproducts to paper cups in the canteen and used truck tires -- so company officials could aggressively reduce what they sent to landfills, he said.
Now, all of the company's office paper is recycled, said company spokesman Richard Dillard.
Also, Milliken officials since the 1960s have closely monitored the company's energy use to look for ways to conserve, Bandy said.
"For every pound of product that we make today, we're using half as much water as we did 12-13 years ago," he said.
Milliken & Co.'s roots go back 140 years to 1865, when Seth Milliken and William Deering founded Deering Milliken Co., a small woolen fabrics jobbing firm in Portland, Maine. William Deering left the company a few years later and started the Deering Harvester Company, which is today known as Navistar.
In 1868, Seth Milliken moved the company headquarters to New York City, at that time the heart of the American textile industry. In 1884, the company invested in a new facility in Pacolet, and from that basic beginning the manufacturing operations grew.
