Environmental Effectiveness

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Any economic activity is likely to create an environmental impact through its use of energy, raw materials and other resources.

What type of economic activity minimises environmental impacts?

Generally, well-designed, well-managed, and well-run businesses and processes do the least damage because they produce the least waste.

Waste can be categorised and defined in many ways. A simple one is:

Any economic activity that does not add value is waste.

This is not the usual definition used by environmental managers, but it is a good definition because it allows both wastes and the causes of wastes to be analysed.

Deploying environmental technology can help reduce impacts on its own, but it is not addressing the causes of waste and poor general management.

At Greenfile Developments, we look at environment effectiveness as a consequence of good management. We do not start with ISO standards or waste segregation, we start from the business process and look for areas where waste can occur - waste in the form of time, resources, cash and effort. We therefore put Environmental Effectiveness as part of Lean Operations because if you are lean, you are minimising waste.

We look for wastes from several directions:

Overall Effectiveness - this examines:

• Availability - how is your asset is being deployed? Equipment not working still needs maintenance, a half-empty office will still need power and maintenance.
  
• Performance - are we working our assets and processes at their designed speed? Running to the wrong schedule means that you are building waste problems upstream and downstream.
  
• Quality - how good is the work we produce? Errors and defects are visible wastes and we see them every day.

This approach is discussed further in an Ideas Article, follow the link to find out how this approach can be linked to personal effectiveness.

Hidden Wastes - this looks at the various causes of wastes that we are so familiar with that we no longer notices them anymore, hence the "hidden" waste.

• Over-doing - if the customer is asking for a yellow paint, we should not be producing solid gold, gold plate or even brass-plating. All these use more resources and do not add value.
  
• Over-stocking - keeping a larger inventory than required means we end up throwing away unused and spoiled items.
  
• Unnecessary movements - if our processes are too complex or badly planned, we end up with more steps than necessary. This leads to extra resources and increases the chances for errors.
  
• Waiting - we still have to pay for people, resources, utilities and information when nothing is happening.
  
• Errors and Mistakes - if you have to do it again, you need at least twice the resources.
  
• Unnecessary Transport - all too often, our processes are designed that each piece of work or information pass through several unnecessary loops for inspection, for approval for inventory checks and so on.
  
• Not working to Schedules - if we are early, we block the workspace and mess up the work plan, if we are late, we mess up the plan for everyone else as well. Waste happens when people are rushing to catch up or running slow to use up the time.
  
• Unused Talent - if we do not listen to ideas for improvement, or do not have a framework for these ideas to be implemented, we miss the opportunities to add value. This is the greatest waste of all.

By adopting a process-led approach, we look at every type of waste and examine their environmental impacts amongst other impacts. We then rank the waste using the Waste Hierarchy (right). The aim being to first Reduce the waste, then try for Reuse the waste. These two activities minimises environmental impacts most. Recovery, which includes Recycling, is something that happens outside the workplace and is an economic activity which creates its own environmental impacts.

The Waste Iceberg Don't focus only on the visible wastes

Although "Recycling" is a favoured buzz word in the media, it is important to remember that if you do not make the waste in the first place, there is no need for recycling. Recycling is an economic activity that uses energy and other resources. The reasons for favouring Recycling are examined in an Ideas Article - "Why everyone loves recycling". The visible wastes you see is only the tip of the iceberg. Many of the causes are linked to poor design of processes, poor communications and poor training of the workforce. The origins of waste and the waste iceberg (below) are discussed in an Ideas Article, updated for 2006. Environmental Effectiveness is an outcome of effective operations, when you sort out the issues that leads to visible wastes, you will reduce your environmental impacts. Contact us about the reducing the cause of wastes and achieving environmental effectiveness.