Lean Manufacturing & Environmental Improvement

Contact: Kevin Prior Date: September 20, 2009

Background

Here at CookPrior we foresee the continuing pressure from environmental regulation bringing both challenges and opportunities to manufacturing and processing businesses. IPPC will impact may more businesses and the EU Directive's such as WEEE, RoHS and the Water framework directive will require steps to be taken to minimise further environmental impact. Similarly stakeholders are looking for clear signs that businesses are addressing environmental sustainability issues. These challenges are all to be met whilst maintaining the business’s economic sustainability.

We believe that a combination of an Environmental Management System such as ISO 14001 and Lean Manufacturing techniques can put a business at the leading edge of these issues.

What is Lean Manufacturing

At its most basic level, lean manufacturing is the systematic elimination of waste from all aspects of a business's activities, where waste is viewed as any use or loss of resources that does not lead directly to creating the product or service a customer wants at the time they require it.

Through its systematic focus on the elimination of non-value-added activity, lean manufacturing substantially improves the environmental performance of an organisation. Even without explicitly targeting environmental outcomes, lean initiatives can yield substantial environmental benefits.

However, although lean techniques will by their very nature produce some environmental benefits, lean methods do not explicitly consider environmental issues, leaving behind explicit environmental improvement opportunities.

In an attempt to maximise the environmental benefits of lean manufacturing CookPrior advocate a combination of ISO14001 and Lean Manufacturing.

This highlights the relationship between lean and the environment and highlights opportunities for further minimising an organisations' environmental footprint their lean initiatives.

Some common outcomes:

  • Lean produces an operational and cultural environment that is open to waste minimisation and pollution prevention. Therefore, significant environmental benefits often accrue from lean initiatives.
  • The powerful economic and competitiveness drivers behind lean drive a willingness to undertake substantial operational and cultural changes, many of which have important environmental performance implications.
  • Lean typically results in less material use and scrap,
  • reduced water and energy use, and
  • a smaller range and lower inventory of chemicals substances added in the manufacturing process.

For a summary of the Environmental Benefits of Lean Manufacturing click here

Lean provides an excellent platform for broadening companies' definition of waste to address environmental risk and product life-cycle considerations as some lean practitioners have demonstrated.

Whilst some regulatory "friction" can be encountered when applying lean to environmentally-sensitive processes, the utilisation of an effective environmental management scheme can enable the right-sized, flexible, and mobile operating approach used in lean manufacturing to be successfully applied in environmentally-sensitive manufacturing processes.

For more information or advice on how CookPrior can provide Environmental Management support in your organisation please e-mail Kevin Prior or Diana Cook or call +44 (0) 1890-818050