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Sustainable Growth:

Eco-Effectiveness

Cleaner Production (CP)

Harnessing Business Benefits

By Vadim Kotelnikov, Founder, The first-ever BUSINESS e-COACH for Innovative Leaders, 1000ventures.com

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Design for Environment (DfE) Cleaner Production

Two Ways of Reducing Production Wastes

  1. Design for Environment: working with process designing and production staff to select materials and/or processes that are less wasteful

  2. Green Procurement: working with purchasing staff to identify suppliers that meet 'industry best practice' in cleaner production

Cleaner Production Strategies

by Graedel and Allenby2

  1. Eliminate residue streams that contain substances under phase-out regulatory restrictions

  2. Minimize the use of de-ionized water, the generation of which consumes substantial amounts of energy and the use of which generates an additional residue stream to worry about

  3. Avoid the introduction or substitution of new residue streams requiring new discharge permits, modifications to existing permits, or off-site disposal

  4. Eliminate or minimize residue streams containing toxic substances, especially those found on regulatory lists

  5. Redesign factory layouts and product routings during manufacture to eliminate all necessary cleaning steps

  6. Replace processes using organic solvents with processes using water-based solvents

  7. Substitute less volatile chemicals for more volatile chemicals in industrial processes

  8. Change processes to eliminate the use of volatile solvents altogether

  9. Attempt to reduce the temperatures of manufacturing processes

  10. Avoid using heavy metal catalysts by substituting processes that achieve the same products by reactions between environmentally benign chemicals

Related Chapters of the Business e-Coach:

Lean Production

Cleaner Production Defined

By its definition, cleaner production is a business strategy for enhancing productivity and environmental performance for overall socio-economic development.

Cleaner production processes are those that produce less waste, whether in terms of liquid wastes discharged to waterways, solid wastes going to landfill or gaseous wastes discharged to the air. Many companies have achieved environmental and economic benefits by implementing cleaner production programs.

Main Features

Although it is not possible to totally eliminate the negative environmental impact caused by mass production, you must strive to make it cleaner when compared with traditional processes. A cleaner production must have one or more features listed below4:

  • Using less raw material,

  • Using recycled material,

  • Using less types of material for the ease of waste recovery,

  • Using less packaging material,

  • Using renewable energy,

  • Using chlorine-free plastics and solvent,

  • Using less energy and nature resource (including land, water and biodiversity, etc.),

  • Generating less waste,

  • Having components that can be reused after disposal.

  • Causing less noise and malodor.

Lean Manufacturing

Lean is about doing more with less: less time, inventory, space people and money. Lean manufacturing is, in its most basic form, the systematic elimination of waste - overproduction, waiting, transportation, inventory, motion, over-processing, defective units -  and the implementation of the concepts of continuous flow and customer pull...More

Integrated Environmental and Quality Management System (EQMS)

A recent market study in the Netherlands initiated by The Dutch Technical Committee on Quality Management and carried out by the Netherlands Standardization Institute (NEN) in collaboration with Tilburg University TIAS Business School concluded that full integration between ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 14001 was possible and  it was easiest for organizations that had  structured their ISO 9001 Quality Management System together with their business processes and such integration could lead to valuable synergies.

Measuring Cleaner Production

Measuring CP is of critical importance. You must use appropriate indicators, which are generally applicable, yet specifically measurable. The indicators should enable not only estimation of the CP of a product or process and its comparison with other equivalents, but also improvement of the existing process or product and the development of new products.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Total Cost Assessment (TCA) are two types of CP indicators that help managers understand the practical implications of GP and make right decisions.3

Case in Point: Shwee Shwian Food Co. (Thailand)

A cleaner production program was implemented in the Shwee Shwian Food Co., a medium-sized ginger factory in northern Thailand. The results showed that the incentive program linked to benefits gained by the company through better control of ginger quality led to better results than the awareness programs. The farmers could benefit from improving the quality of their ginger, lower their operating costs, and improve their productivity as well. Return on investment amounted to 1,483% within the first year.

 

Bibliography:

  1. "Design + Environment", Helen Lewis and John Gertsakis, 2001, published by Greanleaf Publishing Limited

  2. "Industrial Ecology", Graedel, T.E., and B.R. Allenby, 1995

  3. "LCA and TCA Proposed as Tools for Measuring Green Productivity", Ik Kim and Tak Hur, 2002

  4. "Cleaner Production Within Small- and Medium Scale Enterprises", Ling Yuang Chen, 2003

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