Move sustainability to plant floor

“Efficiency and the greening of manufacturing go hand-in-hand because they’re both about avoiding waste, stopping waste,” said Trevor Cusworth, director, Deloitte Consulting LLP.
Cusworth gave a keynote at 2008 Pack Expo International in Chicago. He titled his talk “Sustainability in manufacturing: From boardroom to the break room.”
Deloitte and PMMI (Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute) have put a study together addressing the pressing issues facing the packaging industry.
Cusworth said C-level executives are very much on board with the trend toward sustainability and most see it as an opportunity and financial must. “The disconnect right now is between management and the plant floor. We need to move the culture to the operations level and get those folks on board, too.”
Deloitte uses the UN/Brundtland definition of sustainability to its analysis of sustainable manufacturing.
“Sustainability, in a general sense, is the capacity to maintain a certain process or state indefinitely. In recent years, the concept has come to apply specifically to living organisms and systems. As applied to the human community, sustainability has been expressed as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
It can be an idea, a property of living systems, a manufacturing method, or a way of life.
“Sustainability is a financial incentive, too,” Cusworth added. “Though, most of the drive is of a non financial nature now, including a company’s reputation and customer demand, we expect the incentives to become more financial in the future.”
Sustainability rests on a three-legged stool. The three pillars of the concept are economic, environmental, and social values.
Manufacturers can take three approaches to sustainability. They are:
• Do nothing, whereby one misses out on about 40% of the market that wants green
• To perform incremental gains in the area, which is to say sustainability takes place on an ad hoc basis and where it’s convenient but it’s not a corporate strategy
• To adopt a “significant gains scenario,” which ties sustainability to corporate strategy and it’s looked at first and throughout the process of manufacturing and product lifecycle
“This third strategy is much like the one that many manufacturers have been using for years as regards to safety. It’s the first and a constant concern,” Cusworth said.
Fundamentally, the consumer will get what he or she wants so education is enormous part of the sustainability process.
-- Nicholas Sheble