Iconic GM World Headquarters Sends No Waste to Landfill

Our world headquarters, the GM Renaissance Center, is now landfill-free. All waste from daily operations is recycled, reused or converted to energy. Here are the top five reasons we’re especially excited about this milestone.

1. It’s our most complex facility to go landfill-free. This six-tower staple of the Detroit skyline brings in as many as 15,000 people each day to work, shop and dine. GM’s only facility open to the public also happens to be a tourist attraction sitting on 14 acres, complete with its own ZIP code.
2. The Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center, the Western Hemisphere’s tallest all-hotel skyscraper, is part of our landfill-free achievement. This hotel already has efforts in place to avoid waste to begin with, like using water stations instead of cups or bottles. Everything from used mattresses to old furniture is reused or recycled.
3. We rallied our partners and employees and increased recycling 127 percent since we began the drive to landfill-free in 2011. We engaged 11 other business tenants and their employees to recycle their paper, plastic and used batteries. Educating how and where to recycle, as well as making it convenient to do so, changed behavior.
4. Over the course of the year, we’ve diverted 5 million pounds of trash from landfill. That’s the equivalent of 200,000 full garbage bags!
5. This achievement now brings our landfill-free facility total to 110. It is symbolic to add our headquarters to this roster, demonstrating that industry leadership in landfill-free means tackling the toughest challenges.

The journey doesn’t stop here. We’ll continually seek better ways to manage waste and help develop the local recycling infrastructure so that it’s easier for companies of all sizes to avoid the landfill.

The Renaissance Center’s breakthrough serves as a model of what can be achieved with collaboration. By working together, we can reduce our collective environmental impact in all ZIP codes.