Motivations for Green Manufacturing

Or ... the ball is rolling

In an early blog posting (July 20th to be exact; http://green-manufacturing.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-green-manufacturing-part-1.html) I started out by posing the question "Why green manufacturing?" This was in my input to what appeared to me to be a lot of discussion and confusion about terms, motivations, likely results and procedures in greening manufacturing.

The justification I gave was as answers in response to the question "why does industry care?:

- Pressure from Government (and let's think global...EU, Asia, US, South America, the whole world's governments - yes, even the UN) in terms of regulations, penalties, tax benefits or obligations. The EU has been very proactive here; US is working on it; China, for example, is working hard on new regulations for both domestic industry and imports.
- Interest in Efficiency/Reduced CoO (remember Deming?) His principles apply here. Waste is waste; reduced cost of ownership (CoO) is still the mantra in most industries (check out semiconductor industry where this is the motivator). Time is money...energy is money...consumables are money. If you can make the same product using fewer resources/energy that seems like a good strategy.
- Scarcity of resources/risk; if you need water for your product and, suddenly, you can't get it in the quantities you need for manufacturing...this is a problem! This is not an abstract concern. Green manufacturing applies to resource availability as well as energy and emissions.
- Continuous Improvement (back to Deming!); while we are working to improve our systems and processes let's integrate green practices as well.
- Pressure from Society/Consumers/Customers; Not to mention your kids! Your customers may not be able to define it, but if you can't show a serious effort in green manufacturing they may go to someone who does; and it may be for a variety of reasons...but why take that chance.
- Pressure from Competitors; if they can do it, and win market share and be profitable as part of an integrated strategy in their business - shouldn't you? Let's not repeat the mistakes of past industries who felt they were isolated from (or simply misread) the shifting market.

When I posted this, last July, I began accumulating evidence in support (or opposition) to these assumptions. One of my favorite web sites, Environmental Leader (see link at the bottom of this blog page), has a number of examples, opinion pieces and news notes that support these motives for green.

On February 8th, Maria Cramer has an article there on how to use what you have to grow sustainability in your organization (see http://www.environmentalleader.com/2010/02/08/accidental-to-purposeful-sustainability-using-what-you-already-have-to-grow-sustainability/). In the article she mentions the following benefits:

"Respect for environment – Your business is doing its part to better the community" and  "Respect for the bottom line – Your business will save money by reducing the use of such things as consumables and natural resources."

Pretty close to the society pressure and efficiency/reduced CoO of my list (and recall CoO is "cost of ownership" - the full cost of purchasing, installing, running, maintaining, and disposing of a piece of equipment, or system, factory, etc.)

Another advert announces a meeting of the Alliance for Water Stewardship roundtable on "Understanding, Measuring and Managing Water Risks, Footprints and Impacts Throughout your Supply Chain" this coming April in London (http://www.corporate-water-scarcity-risk-management.com/). That's item 3 on the list above.

Another one of my favorite "go to" sites is Greenbiz.com (also with a link below). They just published their "State of Green Business 2010" Report (see http://www.stateofgreenbusiness.com/). It is a long and comprehensive report (but free and can be downloaded - green indeed!) but mentions, among other items, that green innovation has become seen as a great idea - and points out that

"The emerging green economy is about much more than green products and services. Behind them are countless materials, processes and technologies. And as the parade of progress marches inexorably forward, a growing number of innovations have a distinctly green tinge, significantly reducing material, chemical, water and energy inputs. Some of the innovations enable closed-loop or cradle-to-cradle products or processes, with little or no problematic waste or emissions." (Source: State of Green Business 2010, Greenbiz.com, page 8).

Wow - we couldn't agree more! And we hope this blog helps to keep up the momentum. This is continuous improvement and efficiency/reduced CoO.

By the way ... just so we are all clear, I am not suggesting all these people read the July 20th blog and then took action! I'm just trying to add evidence to the motivations proposed.

Finally, as a mechanical engineer I naturally am a member of ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) and get their monthly magazine "Mechanical Engineering" (appropriately titled!). This month there is an article on "Compelled to be Green" by Jeff Winters that reports on an ASME/Autodesk study on sustainability (called the Sustainable Design Trend Watch Survey) to determine the interest and attitudes of ASME members on this topic.

The article made a few summary statements about the results. For example:

"In spite of the recession, most working engineers reported that their companies continued to be involved with sustainability or sustainable technologies. Indeed, more than 24 percent reported that their companies were extremely involved in sustainability and 43 percent were somewhat involved.

Of the 89 percent who said their companies had any level of involvement, just over seven in ten reported that their companies were creating designs that use less energy or produce fewer emissions. More than 70 percent also responded that their companies were producing designs specifically to comply with governmental standards and regulations.

About four in ten reported that the companies they worked for were involved in making designs that use non-toxic materials, or recycled materials, or a reduced amount of material in manufacturing."  (Source: Mechanical Engineering, February 2010, page 42; and see http://memagazine.asme.org/Articles/2010/february/Compelled_Green.cfm for the full article.)

That seems to be pretty good support for the continuous improvement argument along with the pressure from government regulation motivation.

And all of these examples lend credence to our interest in developing tools for analysis and execution of designs and manufacturing to insure that the greening being considered is going to be as impactful as we hope.

Much more to come on this.

Next time we'll talk about what level of change will be needed to truly affect greening and a significant impact on global warming and  resource use. Brace yourself - low hanging fruit is not going to do it.

Pro Choice for Green

Or ... go climb a hill!

I hesitate to use such a provocative title but, relative to the posting last week, I believe it is the only way to go. I'll get to why in a bit.

Recall that last week we discussed the problem of reducing the complexities of determining whether one process was "more green" (or less impactful) than another. And I referred to this as the "paper or plastic" question.  I said that the phrase "paper or plastic" points out the often confusing choices we are faced with when trying to do the right thing. I then gave a great example of this from a Brazilian colleague who was comparing grinding versus machining in a manufacturing example.

So, relative to those kinds of decisions - I am definitely "pro choice". Let me explain.

Depending how large you draw the control volume (meaning, how much of reality you want to include in your analysis) you can get some different pictures of the impact of a process (or product) compared to another. This was the basis of the paper vs plastic dilemma. Some say that, because the plastic bag weighs a lot less than a paper bag (and since transportation is often the biggest contributor to the impact of plastic bags) you can transport many many more plastic bags for the same volume of paper bags. So, on a "per use basis" (and there are other considerations of course but let's keep it simple for the moment) the plastic bag has less impact. Of course, others cite issues with recycling (paper is usually easier) or litter (you rarely see paper bags flapping in the breeze on fences along the freeway) as considerations that tip the balance towards paper. And then there are reusable bags (paper or plastic). People can honestly choose one over the other and argue, with some scientific evidence on their side, that their choice is "best." But, this always depends on the control volume. How wide are you willing to cast your net to include all the important bits of data in impact? But you have to make a choice.

I often use a simple example with students (told to me in a seminar a decade ago by an early environmental engineer for a major consumer product company). He posed the question: which is better - to make your orange juice from a frozen concentrate (or at least liquid container) or to squeeze locally purchased oranges yourself to get the juice? Berkeley students almost always went for the "squeeze it yourself" option since is sounds more green. Of course that is not correct (unless you have an orange tree in your backyard that is). Since transportation is the major source of "orange juice environmental impact", the density of shipping concentrate or liquid OJ is so much greater than the juice content in the orange as shipped - there is no comparison. Of course, we don't consider taste here.

The important point is that you have to carefully consider the key information when making the decision - information like:

- how much of the process chain (or supply chain) do you want to include?
- how much of the intangibles should be included (meaning, as in the OJ case, taste or more generally the non-quantitative aspects of the decision making like litter in the paper or plastic case)?
- how do you want to value the future (meaning what is your time horizon and do you need to worry about - the next 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years)?
- what do you do about data you don't have or can't get hold of easily (meaning, for example for many materials, the data sheets are non-existent or very sparsely populated, or the business practice of that small supplier to you in some distant part of the world is not apparent)?
- how sure am I that the information I am using today is going to be valid tomorrow (or the next quarter, or fiscal year; meaning prices change, vendor practices change, markets change, etc.)?
- how do I know what the state, federal, international regulations are going to be in the future?

And so on.

Fortunately, the situation is not insolvable. I am an engineer. Engineers have been confronting these types of "uncertainties" for centuries. Mostly we made great progress with few mistakes. Sometimes we made really big mistakes (see Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Challenger Space shuttle, New Coke - well ... let's not burden engineers with this one!) but we always learned from these and made progress. Same situation for the "paper or plastic" question.

We can make a choice, and feel comfortable with it, if we have done our due diligence in attempting to understand a reasonable range of the process or supply chain we have the most influence over (and that we believe captures the most of the impact) and use our best judgement to fill in the pieces we don't know well or at all or can't find information on. This gives us a start. We can go through the other information uncertainties listed above in the same way.

If we feel we are on really thin ice then we need to update our analysis or decision frequently to see if better information is available. We need to keep asking questions and "fill in the blanks" as we gain experience with our system. It's sort of like one of these Sudoku puzzles ... but sometimes with only a few numbers filled in to start with.

When I was a graduate student I took a course on a statistical methodology called "response surface methodology" or RSM. This was intuitively very easy to understand. Relative to the problem we were solving, it assumed that the world could be represented as a hill. The optimum place to be was on top of the hill. We were not able to see the whole hill but could, from our present position, reach out in four directions and try to "feel the slope." You did that by running some experiments over a range of conditions, or some simulations, or other testing (think Taguchi). Then, based on the results of that, plan a next move in the direction of steepest ascent. By repeating this we eventually climbed to the top. (And don't ask what happens if the "hill" is just a small bump on the side of the real hill - that, of course, complicates things).

Decision making in green manufacturing is a bit like that. We make our decision (or our choice of paper vs plastic, frozen or squeezed, and so on) based on where we think we are on the hill and how we feel the slope of our situation. We need to collect enough information to get a reasonable feel for where we are and what is the likely direction to climb the hill. If we can do that, we can feel comfortable that we are making progress.

In some of the previous postings I've reviewed ways to "feel the slope of our situation". These can be helpful in our decision making. Not making a decision is, after all, " a decision"!

We all have to choose to either stay with what we have or look at alternatives that can offer green solutions to our processes and systems. And in choosing those alternatives we need to go with what we can discern and where we feel the slope is steepest.

So, make your choice and happy climbing!

Paper or plastic?

We aren't really going to delve into this question at this time (although in the LMAS we are working on sustainable packaging and how to add some clearer data on benefits/costs/tradeoffs in packaging choices - more on this in a later posting) but it is phrase that we are confronted by more often these days. I've seen hard core environmentalists stumble when asked this in the grocery store line. The truth is, not surprisingly, the answer is not simple. Depending on what you consider in your analysis, the answer may be different.

The phrase "paper or plastic" does point out, however, the often confusing choices we are faced with when trying to do the right thing.  We'll talk about this in this posting (and have a bit more casual conversation than the past few blogs.) The topic is really comparisons between comparable technologies and how they stack up in terms of green manufacturing.

At a recent conference in Europe on manufacturing engineering there was a growing presence of green and sustainable topics of discussion - ranging from the folks like myself who are looking a systematic ways to address, assess and act on green technology for manufacturing to others who are simply trying to figure out what is best. That is, paper or plastic?

A good friend and colleague from Brazil and a grinding expert, Dr. Joao Oliveira, gave an interesting paper on "Sustainability performance assessment of Grinding and Turning applications." Meaning, in a face off between grinding and turning - which is more "sustainable?" Logical question, right?

For those of you who are not manufacturing processing folks, grinding uses abrasives fixed on a wheel or other shape, rotated against a workpiece to remove small amounts of the workpiece with each engagement of the abrasive grain (the piece of abrasive) with the work. It is able to remove a lot of material of different types and create a very nice surface finish. So, many components in your automobile (like crank shaft, valves, etc.) or in jet engines are ground. Turning uses a single point tool made of a hard wear resistant material to remove metal in chips by engaging the workpiece (which in this case is turning, or rotating, hence the name) along the length of the material to be removed. Usually this has a higher material removal rate and can handle some more complex shapes but doesn't yield a fine a surface finish.

Both processes can use liquid for chip handling and temperature control, or not. Both require energy to drive the process and both are widely used in industry.

My friend Joao reviewed what the industry and researchers normally consider as the basis for  assessment of grinding vs turning:
- minimum setup time
- process flexibility
- material removal rate
- low residual stress
- process reliability
- quality of surface roughness
- dimension and shape accuracy
- low sub-surface damage, and
- environmental compatability

These are all production characteristics that are important to manufacturing productivity as well as quality. Things like residual stress (the tendency for a part to deform after processing due to an imbalance in the stress state from machining - like distortion or warping) and subsurface damage (excessive destruction of the basic material condition below the surface, and not visible, that can limit the life of the product in fatigue situations) as well as the others need to be controlled in any fair comparison or else the processes are not interchangeable.

It is important to note that one cannot generally simply replace grinding with turning (or the reverse) but there are many situations where they can be interchangeably used. For a fair analysis one needs to try to start with those situations.

Now, on to the "comparison." Dr. Oliveira put forward a set of "core sustainability performance aspects" that could be used as a basis of evaluation of these two process choices (assuming the results of the processes, according to the items above, are as close to the same as possible.) The figure below, from Dr. Oliveira, summarizes these aspects.

As you see, these aspects address the three pillars of sustainability- finances, environment, and social.

It is interesting to see the elements chosen for evaluating the sustainability of the processes. Certainly, cost is one piece. But we also see ROI considerations, energy, emissions/waste and effluents, labor relations, training, health and safety, and so on.

Some of these are easier to characterize than others. Labor relations was measured by average salaries of machine operators for the two cases. Health and safety was measured by job related accident data, noise levels and risk data. Apprentice training data was used to assess training differences as a social element. ROI info can come from investment calculations for comparable (in capability) machine tool costs of purchase, maintenance and disposal. End-of-life information was based on retrofit costs to return a used machine to productive use (a typical end use scenario for machine tools).

The study then used three "business" scenarios as a basis for decision making (The question to be answered was - Which of the sustainability dimensions is more relevant in this scenario?) :

Scenario 1: Economic return and environmental laws and standards followed
Scenario 2: Cleaner production strategy
Scenario 3: Sustainable production strategy

It is hard to give all the details of the analysis ... but, to summarize:

- When the environmental and social dimensions grow in relevance, turning has the larger advantage. This is likely influenced by the energy/unit of material processed, the size and nature of the "swarf" (or chips) which, for grinding, are very fine and often considered to be more hazardous, and, grinding has a potential for more severe accidents due to wheel problems, etc.

- The economic performance of grinding appears to be superior than turning, probably due to the cost/performance in which grinding gives a better surface quality, for example.

- With respect to health and safety, turning shows better performance considering health and worker safety indicators while grinding is superior with respect to salary and training.

- Overall, there was no real difference with respect to the two from a purely "social dimension" but one would conclude that turning was more "sustainable."

Dr. Oliveira was quick to point out that this is not the death knell for grinding! But, it is an interesting example of a sober comparison. And Oliveira's presentation was followed by one from a US company heavily into grinding, specially for very large components as in wind turbines, who showed that, in terms of specific energy (energy per volume of material used), grinding was way ahead!

So ... there you have it. As I stated in the beginning, depending on what you consider in your analysis, the answer may be different! This is not surprising, nor is it a problem. What is encouraging is that one can consider this wide range of elements around a process choice and get answers that are reasonable.

Finally, in the "odds and ends" department, I served as a judge for a recent business plan competition on the Berkeley campus. If you are not familiar with these, some organization or company pledges a reasonable sum of money to the team that has the best business plan for some new product, system, etc. Smart students flock to these like moths to a light.  In this case it was for socially relevant business propositions.

One of the teams represented a new venture in the bay area, BTTR (or Back to the Roots) which was, to me, as clear an example of a sustainable business as you can find (and see  http://www.bttrventures.com/ for more details.)

From their website they state that "BTTR Ventures, formed by two 2009 grads from  UC Berkeley, is turning one of the largest waste streams in America, the tons of coffee ground waste generated daily, into a highly-demanded, nutritious, and valuable food product – gourmet mushrooms. Currently, BTTR Ventures is transforming over 6000 lbs a week of coffee grounds from Peet’s Coffee and Tea into delicious oyster mushrooms, the BTTR Garden (grow-it-at-home mushroom kit), and rich compost (spent mushroom substrate)." So, diverting tons of waste from landfills, taking waste off the hands of companies that otherwise need to pay to get rid of it, growing, locally, a valuable product (specially in the gourmet bay area) - all positive steps.

And, I learned that at the end of the growing cycle, the rich compost can be used for soil to plant more crops ...  maybe even grow coffee! Talk about cradle to cradle.

I know, some of you are saying ... mushrooms?! But, examples of successes are important. Mushrooms today ... machine tools tomorrow!

Low Hanging Fruit - 4

Last part in a 4 part series

The "map" of spatial and temporal levels of design to manufacturing to distribution/enterprise effects we've been discussing forms the basis of identifying the information and potential actions to take over this complex space. I cannot go into all the possibilities in any detail.

The paper on which this discussion has been based ("Appropriate use of green manufacturing frameworks" authored by Corrine Reich-Weiser, Athulan Vijayaraghavan and myself) was submitted to the CIRP 2010 LCE Conference in Heifei PRC later this spring. A copy of the full paper is available - please send me an e-mail if you'd like a copy or, soon, we'll have it posted on the LMAS website. The paper goes on to review the leading life cycle analysis (LCA) methodologies (for example, process LCA, hybrid LCA and input-output LCA) and LCA frameworks and standards (for example, ISO 14040 and ISO 14044: 2006, US EPA : Life Cycle Engineering Guidelines: 2001, and NIST SLIM (SLIM stands for "Sustainable and Lifecycle Information-based Manufacturing"), and some green house gas (GHG) specific frameworks and standards (for example, PAS 2050, for publicly available standard 2050, and Corporate Reporting and Inventory Standards - Climate Registry and EPA Climate Leaders are good examples of reporting standards, while the WRI/WBCSD GHG Protocol and ISO 14064-1 are well-known inventory standards.)

We analyze how LCA and GHG methodologies apply at the various temporal and spatial levels we've been discussing. Not surprisingly, different methodologies and frameworks apply at different levels. The figures below, from the paper, show this variation. The colored dots indicate the degree of applicability - green indicates that the methodology applies well, yellow indicate a decent applicability, and red indicates poor applicability.

These figures suggest when each methodology is appropriate for each temporal and spatial level of manufacturing. Some are not applicable at all for some aspects of manufacturing.

The key differences to understand are that process LCA is most appropriate for detailed analysis of specific stages of an assessment or well-defined pieces of the manufacturing lifecycle. Hybrid assessment is best for two purposes: (1) ensuring a complete analysis across the boundaries of the analysis and (2) providing a screening to determine where process LCA is most effective.

Most existing standards are based on process LCA. In addition, existing GHG standards limit the scope of the analysis to only direct and electricity emissions, thus limiting the usefulness of the results. The exceptions to this are the PAS 2050 standards and the emerging WRI enterprise and full produce LCA guidelines. For the most part, the standards have focused on quantifying facility level emissions making extrapolation to the machine or supply chain level difficult. The figures demonstrate how these standards apply.

So, what does this all mean with respect to our discussion? Depending on the goal and scope of the assessment there is an appropriate tool available. However, all tools do not apply at all levels. Top-down hybrid LCA methodologies are effective at capturing full supply chain and enterprise level emissions; however process LCA approaches are most effective for tradeoffs at the factory or machine tool tool level of analysis. Most standards have focused on process LCA or limited enterprise LCA (just direct and electricity emissions). However, it is possible that this hole in existing standards will be filled by the emerging WRI standards on Scope 3 and product analysis.

So, back to our low hanging fruit. In addition to the methodologies identified above as applicable across the temporal and spatial scales of the manufacturing enterprise (some available for free on the internet, i.e the Carnegie-Mellon economic input-output LCA tools, see http://www.eiolca.net/) there are some more straightforward approaches.

One example addresses the concerns around sustainable packaging and the manufacture of packaging. Joe Greene, a professor of mechanical engineering at California State University - Chico has started, with industry support, the nonprofit Sustainable Green Products Inc. He starts with a "Sustainable Green Packaging Audit Checklist" which includes easily accessible information such as annual electricity and natural gas usage, car and air travel, amount of product used and recycled at the plant,waste generation and so on. Note - this is for plastic processing operations for packaging - not for everyone. But it's a start! Joe is working on a website but if you want more information contact him at jpgreene@csuchico.edu.

There are a number of similar efforts across many industries. We'll look into some of these in future postings. Whether or not they are complete or reliable depends on who's put them together. But they give you some initial data.

Next time we'll get a little less "academic" and talk about some interesting comparisons between comparable manufacturing technologies (different process paths to the same result) and how they stack up in terms of green manufacturing.

Low Hanging Fruit - 3

Part 3 in a series

The hierarchies of manufacturing we've been discussing reflecting the different levels of "control" and "flexibility" one has from design to manufacturing have both temporal and organizational spans.  We were discussing the need to clearly identify the quality and quantity of information that passes through the interfaces between the levels because a natural result of information crossing interfaces it the potential for noise and inaccuracy. It is like the game we played as kids trying to whisper a phrase around a circle of other friends - the phrase coming out at the end was usually quite different than the one we started with!

This time we'll discuss the interaction between the four temporal and spatial levels described in the last two postings. A figure in the last post showed these four levels, from product design through process design and planning (manufacturing plan) to parameter selection and process optimization to post manufacturing operations (finishing, etc.) The flexibility to make decisions decreases as we move "lower" in the levels.

This makes sense. On the factory floor we are no longer able to change the product or component design, material or other features. We may not, at level 3, be able to do much about the suite of machines we intend to use to produce the part. We most likely can adjust some of the operating parameters or, at level 4, do some finishing or alteration to overcome a problem. The difference is somewhat like experiencing building and outfitting a house - from the architect-design stage to arranging the furniture in the finished house.

In the first posting we listed a number of "spatial" levels of manufacturing (from device to enterprise) and the levels discussed above are temporal levels - relating to different times. We can represent the interaction between these four temporal and spatial levels as in the figure below (and this is another one you'll probably have to click on to see clearly). The smaller arrows represent flow of information from one decision to another.

The figure represents, at differing spatial levels, the equivalent to the four temporal levels from above, the interactions and some of the details. This figure is from a paper submitted to the 2010 CIRP Life Cycle Engineering Conference in Heifei China later this spring (see http://lce2010.hfut.edu.cn/) and co-authored with C. Reich-Weiser and A. Vijayaraghavan.

As we move up and to the right in the figure we suffer a loss of decision making capability as all earlier decisions earlier in the product design cycle, or lower in the supply chain, effect the ability to make decisions at higher levels. So, at the enterprise spatial level, level 3 (logistics adjustments here) decisions are restricted to adjustments in supplier locations or distribution strategy rather than substantial changes. Similarly, at the machine design spatial level (equivalent to enterprise design but closer to the product), level 3 (machine manufacturing adjustments here) decisions are limited to such things as adjusting consumables or tooling.

How you address what is happening at any location within this matrix depends on what information you have about the process or system represented there, what your understanding is of what this information says about what's going on, what ability you have respond to this understanding, if needed (or leave it alone if it is performing correctly), what "levers and buttons" you have at your disposal to make a response and, finally, what means you have to determine if your response had any impact and, if so, how much.

So, back to our low hanging fruit. It seems obvious that the lowest hanging fruit is found at the lowest branches of the tree. So, in this representation, the low hangers are at the lowest level of flexibility. Changing the design or material of a product is not going to be low fruit. Changing machine operation to produce that item using less consumables (or less damaging consumables) or energy (change operation) may be.  In a metal cutting operation, changing tooling to increase machining efficiency is relatively straightforward. Adjusting tool path and cutting conditions, if on a computer controlled machine tool, is a bit more complicated but also reasonable. These are also low level fruit.

And, referring to the information you have and your understanding of it discussion above, choice of the appropriate methodology for conceptualizing and measuring environmental impacts is important.

We will pick up on this discussion next time. I need to keep this edition a bit shorter as I am still traveling in Europe at my conference.

And we'll also talk a bit about "smart grids" next time and what their impact might be on manufacturing. If you are not familiar with what smart grids are, your assignment is to google it and find out!

Low Hanging Fruit - 2

The term "low hanging fruit" is employed here to address things that can be done with out a lot of staff or resources and, specially, for smaller companies. This is of particular interest with respect to measuring or characterizing your scope 1-3 impacts. And, we agreed upon a definition of cost, or what's "too much for a small company," by starting with free and moving upwards. We continue the discussion started last week.

I was discussing this with one of my graduate students, Corinne Reich-Weiser, the other day and she commented that, actually, smaller companies may be at an advantage with respect to these calculations since in general the number of details for a product, financial interactions, suppliers, etc. might be smaller. She is working with a small company herself during her PhD studies, Climate Earth in San Francisco (http://www.climateearth.com/). They work a lot with companies of all sizes and have an approach that does enterprise and supply chain carbon accounting, specially the tricker Scope 3, based on the company's financial data and utility bills, etc. So, for this data smaller is better. (I have no stake in Climate Earth's business and only use this as an example of a situation when the requirements (data, cost, time, personnel) for assessment scale with the size of the business.)

In the previous posting, January 7th, I built the comments on material recently submitted to a life cycle engineering conference in China (and Corinne was one of the co-authors). Last time we discussed facility or spatial representations of frameworks for green manufacturing. We termed this part of the process to "find the tree" so we can look for the low hanging fruit. Now we go on to the temporal aspects of the life cycle assessment.

To do this, we start with the design of the product, and proceed through the design of the manufacturing process or system for the product, through to process optimization, and finally post-process control and abatement. I've been representing the "levels" of manufacturing in this way for some time. It is a convenient way to visualize the decreasing flexibility or choices (engineers might call these degrees of freedom) that occur as you move from the conceptual design to the concrete elements of a manufacturing process.

These levels are temporal in nature across the design-to-manufacturing lifecycle of the process, and can be applied in characterizing the degree of control over the environmental impact at each level. We've arbitrarily labeled the highest level as Level 1. It is the earliest in design and manufacturing - the "clean sheet of paper" stage all engineers dream about doing when they are in engineering school! At this stage all future decisions to be made in subsequent (and lower flexibility) levels 2-4 can be influenced. At Level 1 process design is integrated with part design and there is the most control over considerations of part precision, environmental impact, and manufacturing scale. Here there is scope to design the product as well as its manufacturing process to satisfy specific requirements in all the criteria.

At Level 2 fundamental process design and planning is performed for a fixed part design, and this drives the part precision, environmental impact, and manufacturing scale. Here there is extensive control over the performance of the process in all the criteria as allowed by the process design and planning.

At Level 3, process parameter selection and optimization is used to control the part-precision and the process environmental impact; control over the process scale at this level is limited by the flexibility possible with process planning and optimization.

Finally, at Level 4 post-process finishing and abatement processes are used in controlling the part-precision and the environmental impact; at this level there is no control over the process or product or system as it has already been designed.

A graphic visualization of these levels is shown below (click on the image for more resolution.) You can imagine how this basic structure can be mapped onto pretty much any product or process or system.

From these hierarchies – which span temporal and organizational spans – we get a sense of the complexity involved in information capture and transfer in manufacturing systems, especially what is required to support effective environmental analysis.

We need to clearly identify the quality and quantity of information that passes through the interfaces between the levels. As information crosses the interfaces, the potential for noise/inaccuracies dramatically increases.

Next time we'll discuss the interaction between the four temporal and spatial levels described last time and just above. We'll see how we can experience a loss of decision making flexibility as decisions earlier in the product design cycle or lower in the supply chain effect the ability to make decisions at higher levels.

Finally, I am writing this from Europe where I am participating in a production engineering academy meeting. That means I had a long plane ride with a lot of time to catch up on some reading - mostly Fortune and Economist magazines. Fortune had an article on getting a green job and pointed to community colleges as the place to go (see Getting a Green Job in Two Years, Mina Kimes in Fortune, November 23, 2009). Community colleges tend to be faster to respond to these growing markets for technical training and the article points to the example of Johnson Controls in Milwaukee partnering with the Milwaukee Area Technical College on a program to train solar installation designers and installers. Johnson Controls is installing a 2,500 panel "solar education farm" for this collaboration (and get some power out of it too!). (For details see http://www.johnsoncontrols.com/publish/us/en/products/building_efficiency/smart_environments/december-2009/urban-solar-farm.html)

In the December 7th, 2009 Fortune Marc Gunther writes about Best Buy's aggressive program to take your electronic waste back at their stores and recycle it. Besides getting customers in the stores the article quotes Best Buy's Senior Director of Corporate Responsibility as expecting this to be a break-even proposition depending on commodity prices. Since many states and some cities require electronic manufacturers to help finance recycling, the economics are tricky but breakeven, or even profit, is possible.

But there's more! And this is really interesting. Best Buy is looking at how to give products "a second life." They are partnering with a company in Irvine California (DealTree; see http://www.dealtree.com/) that helps manage trade-in and auction, processing of used items - the reverse supply chain we saw in the Ricoh comet chart. Customers can get credit in the form of gift cards for "gently used" electronics. They are also toying with the idea of the customer leasing an electronic product, for example, by guaranteeing a trade in value after some period of time.

We spoke of this concept some time ago and the real benefit being that companies design products differently if they are responsible for them (and must take them back and recover/recycle the material). As much thought then goes into taking them apart as assembling them in the first place. That means that the "lower levels" of manufacturing play a more prominent role at level 1 since they strongly affect this recovery/recycling and, importantly, any resulting profit.

And, the Fortune article states, this would remove the penalty of trading up in terms of technology every time a new electronic gadget comes along!

Low Hanging Fruit

One of the readers of this blog posed a very interesting question following the December 25th posting and the discussion there about making sure all the scope impacts (1-3) are included in an analysis of a process, system or product footprint. The question was, essentially, what can you do if you are a smaller company than Walmart to achieve any sort of measurement on the indirect stages? The follow on was that the financial and human resources necessary to accomplish this would be huge (i.e. too much) for a small company.

I commented that this was a great question and really gets to the heart of the issue ... what can be done that doesn't require a lot of resources but is effective? Then I referred to this the "low hanging fruit" strategy. I did not mention that, according to Fortune magazine and their Fortune 500 listing, any company other than Exxon is "smaller than Walmart" (see http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2009/full_list/ if you want to check this out). But, I believe the question was intended to cover companies in the small to medium size category! So, let's go with that. And, we could have a long discussion about what, in terms of resources is "too much for a small company" but let's start out with free and move upwards.

In my response I mentioned that some "low hanging fruit" ideas include the resources on the Carnegie Mellon LCA website (http://www.eiolca.net/) that allow a quick look at aspects of your business and calculates a footprint (rough but helpful),  a simple questionnaire to major suppliers, resource providers to see if they are aware of their impacts (embedded energy, resource use, etc.), charting  "where things come from and where they go" (and this could be a useful group activity) to get a sense of the complexity of your production, and, finally (but not free), some of the resources listed in earlier blogs (like the lean green work or economic bottom up LCA tools) can be used effectively. There are also many groups forming in various regions that are struggling with this same problem and they try to network and share approaches to this, and other, issues.

I promised to work on this and use it as the content of a future blog so and go into more detail. It's 2010 and the future is now so I'd like to start the conversation off today and continue it over the next few postings.

By way of the discussion I will be extracting some material from a paper that two of my graduate students and I just prepared for submission to a life cycle engineering conference in China later this year. The paper was on "Appropriate use of green manufacturing frameworks" and was co-authored with Corrine Reich-Weiser and Athulan Vijayaraghavan (Corrine is a current PhD student and Athulan just completed his PhD - both are the kind of students that make being a professor fun and rewarding!).

In this paper, we started out with the comment that the question usually put forward is ‘where to begin?’ This is similar to the set up for this posting and is part of our strategy to address the low hanging fruit. But, first, we need to find the tree!

One of the challenges in assessing the environmental sustainability of a manufacturing process (or system) is the need to parse the process or system in a way that makes it appropriate for application of some kind of analysis - that is "find the tree". When we find the tree (or actually trees in this case) we can then determine our reach and see what is, in that context, "low hanging." And, I promise, this is as far as I will push this analogy!

This is challenging because it’s complicated. Sorting out when and how to use various analysis tools makes it easier to begin. This usually involves determining reasonable size elements of the problem (bite sized chunks so to speak) based on process or system complexity and the level at which the process resides in the design to manufacturing space.

A number of questions arise that must be answered, such as:

- How do we find the optimal balance between productivity, cost, quality and sustainability?
- What performance characteristics do you track and how do they relate to each other?
- In your analysis, what metrics, LCA, decision-making tools can scale over multiple levels?
- What decisions made at one level are not tracked at other levels?

Some of this came up in our discussion about lean and green. We will begin this discussion here and continue it over the next few blogs. First we'll take a shot a defining what our field of view is (sort of the google earth view of manufacturing we had some time ago - see Sept. 15, 2009, http://green-manufacturing.blogspot.com/2009/09/green-manufacturing-technology-wedges.html). I also appreciate that this discussion will go well beyond the original focus of the question raised but, hey, I'm an academic and there are no short answers!

The complexity and sophistication in the organization of manufacturing systems and processes, large or small,  requires a keen understanding of the organization for accurate environmental analysis. To assist in this effort, manufacturing can be broken into “levels of study” across two orthogonal frameworks, spanning organizational and temporal levels. From the perspective of the organization of the system, we can consider manufacturing processes as being composed of four levels, from the level of the individual devices where unit processes take place, through to that of the enterprise, incorporating all the activities in the manufacturing system, including supply chain externalities.

These four levels are as follows:
1- Device – Individual device in the manufacturing system, which is performing a unit process. Support equipment for the unit process are included here such as gage systems, device level oil-circulating systems etc.,

2- Line/Cell – Logical organization of devices in the system that is acting in series or parallel to execute a specific activity (such as manufacturing a part or assembly). Support equipment for the collection of devices are included here, such as chip conveyers, tool cribs, etc.,

3- Facility – Distinct physical entity housing multiple devices, which may or may not be logically organized into lines, cells, etc., Support equipment required at the facility level are also included here, such as power generators, water purifiers, HVAC systems, etc.,

4- Enterprise – The entire manufacturing enterprise, consisting of all the individual facilities, the infrastructure required to support the facilities, as well as the transportation and supply chain externalities.

Given these levels, which are essentially, facility or spatial representations, we'll go on to the temporal aspects of the life cycle - next time.