Materials selection

* We have always had a philosophy of, wherever possible, not incorporating scarce resources into our products.
* We have set ourselves a goal of eliminating brominated fire retardants in plastics.
* Currently we are changing grades of ABS to ones that give off very much less styrene monomers during processing.

Manufacturing technologies

* We have eliminated our production paint shops which inefficiently painted large empty white boxes with high solvent wet paint - more details on this can be found under "Cleaner production methods".
* All our factories operate On-line manufacturing. This results in less waste, and also less inventory.

Packaging systems

* As detailed above, all packaging is either reused or recycled, which eliminates waste and reduces the amount of packaging that is dumped into landfill.

Cleaner production methods

* We have eliminated our production paint shops which inefficiently painted large empty white boxes with high solvent wet paint. We first moved to powder coating which eliminated solvents then to prepainted galvanised steel. This is efficiently painted with a paint system with much lower solvent loading in a dedicated plant that is equipped to deal with VOCs. Painting a continuous sheet is done by roller or curtain coating rather than by spraying.
* Our electronics factory is working to eliminate hot air levelling of solder after soldering, which saves energy.
* They have dramatically improved their first past yield (from 48% to 96%) thus dramatically cutting rework and scrap.
* Staff from Recycling are actively engaged in investigating the waste stream from the Auckland factories and re-routing all materials that can be recycled . In the last year the reduction of material to landfill has been 40% and we are confident of improving that further.
* We have made huge inroads into recycling in-house, all our injection moulding rejects and sprues. The policy is that, wherever practical, all new injection moulding tools will be hot runner, which eliminates the generation of material to scrap or recycle.

Elimination of lead or other potentially harmful substances from manufacturing processes

* Our component to circuit board assembly process has eliminated the use of CFC’s in cleaning (and avoided the use of HCFC’s).
* We are trialing VOC-free fluxes for this circuit board assembly.
* Lead elimination is also dealt with under ‘Elimination of hazardous substances’ later in this submission.

Elimination of hazardous substances

CFC’s were eliminated in 1994. This included eliminating them from refrigeration systems and from refrigerator insulating foam. (Unlike some of our competitors, we did not move to HCFC’s for insulation. We understand that a major local competitor is still using HCFC-141b in their chest freezer foaming.)