Lean and Green - Lean and Environmental Performance
In its most basic form, lean manufacturing is the systematic elimination of waste from all aspects of an organization's operations, 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 when they want it. Through its systematic focus on the elimination of non-value-added activity, lean manufacturing substantially improves the environmental performance of organizations. Even without explicitly targeting environmental outcomes, lean initiatives can yield substantial environmental benefits.
Lean produces an operational and cultural environment that is highly conducive to waste minimization and pollution prevention. Significant environmental benefits typically ride the coattails of 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 decreased number and amount of chemicals used.
Lean can be leveraged to produce even more environmental improvement. Although lean currently produces environmental benefits and establishes a systemic, continual improvement-based waste elimination culture, lean methods do not explicitly incorporate environmental performance considerations, forgoing some environmental improvement opportunities. 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.
Read more about Lean & Environmental Performance on the EPA website.
