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Power of Green Sidebar:
From Trash to Treasure

Courtesy Caterpillar

Caterpillar Inc.’s Mapleton, Ill., foundry was put to good use.

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While environmental concern over abandoned factories is growing, Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) is putting an old foundry in Mapleton, Ill., to good use. Caterpillar closed the plant in the late 1980s after building a more modern facility nearby. For nearly two decades the company tried to sell the property with no luck, and then Caterpillar executives had another idea. “At the current price of steel, we determined that structural steel was worth more than the market value of the property,” says Lyle Fricke, a senior engineering project team leader in CAT’s global facility planning group.

After carefully pulling the foundry apart, CAT says, it has found an environmentally sustainable use for almost all the materials. Once mercury was removed from the old light fixtures, the metal frames were recycled. The wooden blocks that made up the foundry flooring were shredded and hauled to an incinerator in Wisconsin, where they were used to generate clean electricity for a local utility. Tons of scrap metal, including aluminum and copper, were recycled, and the concrete was processed and crushed on-site to create clean fill.

CAT says it even salvaged nearly 17,000 tons of structural steel, which was transferred to the new foundry to be made into new engine casings for its heavy equipment. “We ended up saving money the way we did it,” Fricke explains. “And we’ve provided a flat surface for future development.”