A Lean & Green Model for a production cell

The purpose of lean thinking is to promote continuous improvement culture within a business. Specifically, lean thinking describes a work philosophy already used by many manufacturers. Lean thinking considers the expenditure of resources, for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful. There has been much anecdotal evidence suggesting that a lean approach can help make the case for environmental impact reduction to businesses. We present an integrated lean and green approach that results in (i) a reduction in production waste and (ii) a reduction in environmental impact. Evidence-based results are first reviewed here. We show that previous findings identify a specific level of lean and manufacturing stability as a prerequisite for integrating lean and green at the manufacturing cell level. The main objective of this paper is to propose a new model, which we call the Lean & Green Model. In this model, we integrate environmental sustainability into pure lean thinking. The model presented in this paper adopts a Kaizen approach to improve mass and energy flows in manufacturing environments that already possess the necessary deployment level to apply lean thinking. The model was designed for, and is limited to, the cell level, which is the first stream level of a manufacturing business that supports the principles of lean thinking. The paper then presents findings from an application of the model in a major international engineering corporation, including the results of model deployment at the cell level. Such findings confirm that the Lean & Green Model can reduce resource use from 30 to 50% on average and has the potential to reduce the total cost of mass and energy flows in a cell by 5–10%.