Ashland Distribution helps clean up chemical waste

Susan Avery -- Purchasing, 11/3/2005

Reverse distribution is what Hank Waters, president of Ashland Distribution, calls his company's environmental services business. He also says it's one of the things that sets Ashland Distribution apart from other chemical distributors.

Another is its employees.

"People make the difference," says Waters. "It's not companies and computers that get things done. My sense is that what differentiates our company from others is that we have created an environment where our people are able to work together as a team and be successful."

With $2.8 billion in annual sales, Ashland Distribution Co. is the second largest chemical distributor in North America, according to PURCHASING magazine's Top 100 Chemical Distributor list for 2004, (PURCHASING, May 5, 2005 Chemicals Edition; p. 36C9). A division of Ashland, Inc., the distributor is located in Dublin, Ohio. It has 70 stocking locations.

Ashland Distribution's product lines are diverse; it sells just about everything from acids and aldehydes to esters and inorganics to polyglycols and surfactants. It serves just as many markets, including primary chemical processing, cosmetics and personal care, pulp and paper, paints and coatings, appliances and automotive.

In addition to warehousing and delivery, Ashland Distribution offers such services as solvent reclamation, blending, contract packaging, technical and safety training and hazardous waste removal. It has storage facilities of 21 million gallons and 3.8 million sq ft. Its fleet consists of 420 trucks, 20 vans, 425 trailers and 240 tankers. Its website is www.ashdist.com.

Ashland Distribution offers hazardous and nonhazardous waste-collection, recovery, recycling and disposal services nationwide—and has been doing so since 1981. The company is an active member of the Chemical Recyclers Council and the American Chemistry Council. CRC's initiatives encourage pollution prevention and waste minimization through responsible recycling. ACC's Responsible Care program enables Ashland Distribution to implement a measurement strategy to improve response to its customers, community, employees and stockholders.

"Environmental services are very important to our customers and are probably going to be more important as time goes by," says Waters.

Ashland Distribution also provides customers responsible care and hazardous materials training. "As a division of a larger company, we have access to experts from our specialty chemical manufacturing business as well as research and development facilities both here in Dublin and in Lexington, Ky.," says Waters. "We have a broad and deep knowledge of how to use and handle chemicals. It just makes sense to make our expertise available to our customers." The distributor also provides access to engineering research and technical services available through the R&D facilities, for a fee.

In line with its focus on serving the customer, Ashland Distribution put in place a formal program for measuring its performance. It's called OTAC for on-time, accurate and complete; and provides a target for its capability to fill customer orders. A help for corporate purchasing managers putting together formal supplier performance metrics of their own, OTAC provides a standard for the distributor's employees. "We hold ourselves against a standard of perfection that we measure religiously day in and day out," says Waters. "We push the organization very hard to make sure we are hitting the targets."

Ashland Distribution is ISO 9002-2000 certified.