Ohio State MBA student Maryjo Mundey (L) and White Castle’s Shannon Tolliver load a box of sanding belts into a van for transportation to Tri-Rivers.
What began as a class exercise for The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business is turning into real-world environmental improvements for Columbus-based White Castle. The Ohio State business college project, led by a Marion woman, will also bring significant savings on supplies to Central Ohio career technical schools, including Tri-Rivers.
White Castle is one of the Columbus-area businesses that partners with Fisher College of Business students, giving them real-life business problems to solve.
Maryjo Mundey is a student in Fisher’s Working Professionals MBA program. She’s also the human resources manager on Ohio State’s Marion campus. Her assignment as a business student was to help White Castle find additional ways to further its environmental practices. The nation’s original hamburger chain has already taken many steps to make its processes more environmentally friendly such as using recycled material in its corrugated packaging and putting white roofs on its buildings to reflect heat.
White Castle’s metal-working division, PSB Company, recycles over 100 tons of metal each year. But a vexing problem was, what to do with the hundreds of abrasive belts the metal shop uses each year to burnish stainless steel parts? Once a belt develops a small fault, it must be discarded to avoid creating blemishes on the stainless steel, yet, the belts retain at least 75 percent of their usable life.
Tri-Rivers construction technologies instructor Steve Lawrence examines how the lightly-used belts can be put to use in the belt sander his students use to smooth boards.
Through her connections at Ohio State and in the Marion community, Mundey discovered Marion’s Tri-Rivers Career Center would be happy to take the lightly-used sanding belts and put them to work in the school’s construction technologies lab. Construction Technologies instructor Steve Lawrence thinks they’ll work on the sanders his students use to smooth boards. The belts can also be cut into sections for use as stationary sanding platforms. There are so many belts, in fact, that Lawrence plans to make them available to other career technical centers in the area. The donation will save the schools thousands of dollars in sanding supplies.
White Castle environmental engineer Jeff Miller estimates the metal shop runs through as many as a thousand belts a year, weighing approximately 1400 pounds and worth $20,000.
“We’re glad we can help out the career centers and provide a second use for our sanding belts,” said Miller.
At Tri-Rivers, Lawrence is excited. “We’ll find lots of uses for these abrasive belts,” he said. “I bet our students will come up with a dozen ideas of how to use them.”
For Mundey, it’s been a successful assignment and a lesson learned on the value of networking, as she works her way toward her MBA. For Ohio State, connecting White Castle and Tri-Rivers Career Center is one more way the university has found to be a partner in the communities where its campuses are located.
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