Creating a Sustainable Manufacturing Operation

Sustainable manufacturing is no longer a buzzword, it’s a business imperative. It’s about balancing environmental responsibility, economic viability, and social equity.

It means fulfilling your fiduciary responsibilities to your associates and your customers. It means avoiding harming the environment and earning expensive and painful fines and penalties. And it means being good corporate and business citizens to maintain a positive reputation in your community.

Sustainable manufacturing is more than just a business practice, it’s a binary choice. You are either for sustainable manufacturing and all the savings and improvements it brings, or you’re against it, and you’re happy to waste money on outdated processes, dangerous practices, and exorbitant penalties.

What is Sustainable Manufacturing?

Sustainability in manufacturing includes a wide range of practices, from reducing the environmental impact of your efforts to improving the health and well-being of your associates. It’s about creating a system that can continue indefinitely without depleting resources or harming the environment.

Some of the core elements of sustainable manufacturing include:

1. Resource efficiency: Reducing the resources you use in your normal operations — energy, water, and material consumption. Just by reusing water or harvesting rainwater, you can reduce water consumption. An alternative energy source can help reduce your overall energy use, even just a fraction.
2. Waste reduction: Implementing strategies that can reduce the amount of waste you create. Even a simple recycling program can reduce the amount of trash you pay to have hauled away. Reusing pallets or requiring vendors to switch to plastic pallets over wood can extend the life of your pallets and ultimately reduce your shipping costs.
3. Environmental impact: Reducing greenhouse gas emissions, waste disposal, and air and water pollution. Things like switching to cleaner-burning fuels (see alternative energy sources), reducing the amount of trash that gets landfilled, and switching manufacturing processes to reduce the amount of airborne and water waste can all reduce your environmental impact.
4. Social responsibility: Prioritize worker safety, fair labor practices, and community engagement. We’ve all heard the stories of companies that ignore worker safety (and environmental safety) concerns all in the name of profits, only to see those savings and then some vanish in workers comp payments, penalties and fines, and lawsuits. It may seem to be foolish to sacrifice those things in the name of corporate profits, but I’m hearing more and more stories of companies who are losing much more than they gained because they ignored worker safety or environmental concerns.
5. Economic viability: In many cases, you can actually save money by focusing on sustainability. It’s not a cost or loss center, it’s a way to increase revenue and reduce costs. For example, in one of our factories, when we switched from a chemical curing process to a steam-curing process, we not only eliminated the need for our chemicals, which improved safety, we also reduced our costs and the number of fines we had to pay to OSHA to nothing. Rather than spending more than a million dollars per year, we lowered our costs to $0. You’d better believe that’s better than trying to raise more money to make up for it.

Building a Sustainable Foundation

Creating a sustainable manufacturing operation requires a holistic approach, not a piecemeal one that only works on bits and pieces of your enterprise.

To start with, you need to conduct a sustainability assessment. Examine your current operations to find the areas that need improvement. Measure your environmental impact, consumption of resources, social performance, and costs that could be eliminated (i.e., trash disposal fees and environmental fines).

Once your assessment is complete, you need to set clear sustainability goals. Since you should already be in the habit of measuring everything, this won’t be a stretch. Set SMART goals — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound — that align with your overall business objectives.

Next, engage your employees at all levels in order to build a culture of sustainability. Give them the necessary training on environmental and social responsibilities. Help them understand how the new program is going to work, but also why you’ve created it.

Collaborate with your suppliers and customers to promote sustainable practices throughout the entire supply chain. For example, if you receive a lot of pallets from one particular supplier, ask them to start providing you with plastic, reusable pallets. If you send out a lot of pallets, switch to plastic and offer your customers incentives for returning them or switching as well.

Finally, consider the environmental impact of your products, from design to disposal. Look at the packaging and resources needed just to package and ship the products. Can you switch to recyclable packaging and products? Can certain parts be made reusable so you can cut down on your raw materials and your manufacturing costs? Is there a way to reduce the amount of materials you use in your packaging and production?

For example, at the grocery store, I have seen single bananas for sale that have been wrapped in a plastic bag or container. Now, the skin of a banana is a natural container. Why do you need to package something in a package?

And now I’m seeing single coffee stirrers wrapped in a plastic sleeve. There’s as much or more plastic being used to wrap the plastic stirrer as there is to make the plastic stirrer.

Look for examples of needless packaging that only wastes raw materials and needless spending.

Building a sustainable manufacturing practice requires strong leadership, internal cooperation, and embracing a long-term perspective over short-term gains. This way, manufacturers can no only reduce their environmental impact, they can gain a competitive advantage, improve their brand, and even save money and increase profits.

Remember, sustainability is a journey; every step counts. So don’t feel like you have to fix everything all at once. Take baby steps at first, and soon you’ll be taking long strides toward great progress.

I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now I help companies turn around their own business, including pivoting within their industry. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Photo credit: User:Anonyme (Wikimedia Commons, GNU Free Documentation License 1.2)