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.

What about corporate sustainability reports (CSR)?

A few weeks back I read a comment from an industry representative questioning the value of corporate sustainability reports - the CSR. Over the past few years (specially as I have been preparing materials for my course on sustainable manufacturing and directing students to sources of information and data on industry performance) I've been impressed with two things.  One is the tremendous evolution of these reports in the past few years from "few and far between" to widely used. And, second, is the impressive increase in information, data and details presented in many of these reports as companies have understood their purpose better and gotten their arms around how to collect, organize and represent the data.

The CSR has its roots in the Global Reporting Initiative ( or GRI - see http://www.globalreporting.org/Home) which describes itself as "a network-based organization that has pioneered the development of the world’s most widely used sustainability reporting framework and is committed to its continuous improvement and application worldwide." They offer a framework that lays out "what to report" and "how to report it." I am not sure how many corporations use this framework in constructing their reports but the goal of transparency and accountability is the major objective.

In my experience, the CSR (whether GRI based or not) has a number of important roles to play in our discussion of green manufacturing and, longer term, our efforts towards sustainability. In no particular order these are:

- education (these documents, freely available, offer a tremendous resource for students, the public, analysts, and so on, to look into an organization to see what is estimated to be the impact, and progress, of their business towards sustainability)
- comparison with others (benchmarking is always useful; one must always read any report that is "self generated" with caution but the CSR offers a convenient way for an organization to measure itself with respect to its competitors, or the industry in general)
- accountability within organization (the CSR offers a convenient vehicle for communicating and empowering various units in to the organization with respect to their piece of the whole picture and what role they play in the - overall impact of the organization (and this is an important one - the CSR, if properly done, will show the magnitude of the challenge facing the organization; it marks the "present state" of sustainability)
- mark progress (if  you know where you are today, and then re-assess where you are tomorrow or next year, you can use the difference, positive or negative, to chart your progress or note where additional effort or better data is needed.)

I'm sure you could add a few additional items to this list.

In my use of the CSR as an educational tool over the last 3-4 years I've noted positive changes in their complexity (meaning the extent to which they represent more and more of the organizations activities - essentially more scopes), transparency, level of detail, and, importantly, the level of "science" and deterministic measures/assessments made in constructing the reports. To me, this is very good. I am also sure this is expensive.

There have been some excellent studies comparing the "quality" of CSR's based on unique scoring schemes. One of the more interesting, and, to me, comprehensive, comparisons has been done by the Roberts Environmental Center at Claremont McKenna College in California (see http://www.roberts.cmc.edu/psi/whatthescoresmean.asp). It is called the Pacific Sustainability Index (PSI), is calculated based on on-line information only and is computed with the following weighting:

Environmental
- Accountability (3%)
- Management (12%)
- Vision and Policy (12%)
- Resources utilizations & emissions data (13%)

Social
 - Accountability (3%)
- Vision and Policy (8%)
- Management (8%)
- Labor issues (22%)

Human rights
- Principles (18%)

Total (100%)

There is a carefully defined scoring criteria that is based on the transparency in the company's public discussions "independent of success in making improvements." My interpretation is that even if you are not doing so well, you get points for being honest about the issues you are confronting (the antidote to 'greenwashing'!).

There is a schema for reporting on both qualitative and quantitative topics. For example, under quantitative - the five measures used in scoring include  i.  discussion on the topic, ii. putting the discussion in an external context, iii. including one or more explicit numerical goals, iv. including at least one previous measure of performance for the topic (and additional point for more than one previous measure - that is, more history). Under the category of environmental reporting the company is given credit for illustrating how their performance relates to that of peer industries or industry standards. Please see the above link for the full explanation. The derived PSI score is represented as a letter grade (this is an academic institution after all!) such as A+, A, A-, B+, etc. but the scores are normalized to the highest scoring company in the same sector. The website says they "grade on the curve."

Now comes the (more) interesting part - the comparisons across sectors using the PSI. You can find the scores by sector and score type (meaning overall PSI score or individual environmental or social components) at an interactive webpage (http://www.roberts.cmc.edu/currentsectordata.asp). The sectors are quite specific - for example, aerospace and defense, government institutions, telecommunications, networks and peripherals, all the way to utilities, gas and electric.  You can "drill down" to each company or institution on the chart displayed to see their individual "grade" and when the latest assessment was published with spider charts representing the scores for the various components.

The information used is from publicly available sources - so if your favorite is not included tell them to get on it! I was chagrined to find that my own institution, University of California Berkeley, is only current up to 2005 (and doesn't get a very good grade! I'm composing the letter to our chancellor right now.) The only redeeming observation is that Cal's arch rival, Stanford, doesn't show up at all! (Go Bears!!)

The best ranked educational institution is Williams College with lot's or A+'s - well done.

Take some time and play around with this informative site and its rankings. The methodology and inclusiveness is most interesting. Of course the scores are nice too! Here's hoping your organization or alma mater rank well!

Happy New Year!

Green New Year

The Copenhagen conference on climate change has just concluded (see http://en.cop15.dk/) and we will not really know or understand the full impact of any decisions made there for some time. I certainly am not going to speculate on this. Different countries will respond in different ways. One of the reasons for getting this blog up and running was to contribute to the discussion about how we, at the manufacturing level, can respond and take advantage of the various initiatives to move us towards a greener world. And, as I've stated before, if you are not convinced of some of the predictions or the urgency of this movement, we are still looking at steadily rising energy costs, restrictions on resources (think water for starters) and consumer preferences and push back as sufficient motivation to pay attention to this. Not to mention the regulations and requirements of many parts of the world in which our products find themselves being used or consumed.

Last posting I mentioned we'd spend a little more time looking at "the scopes" - that is  Scope 1 through 3 of ISO 14064 (1- direct emissions from on-site/company owned assets, 2- indirect emissions  from energy generation or supply, 3- all others resulting from your business operation including business travel, shipping of goods, resource extraction and product disposal)) and, now, the movement toward Scope 4, which would include the use phase and end of product life, is under discussion. Many of you are already familiar with these and their implications for determining a carbon footprint and green house gas impact for our organizations.

The figure below, from Future State Solutions based on information from the World Resources Institute (http://www.wri.org/) shows this graphically. (Another version with a discussion on the green house gas protocol is available at http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/06/0F/T060F0000090023PDFE.pdf (from 2008) with original information at http://www.ghgprotocol.org/).

Interestingly, and we discussed this in the last Future State Solutions webinar, for many companies the bulk of the impacts (that is the contribution by scope) comes from scopes outside of their core control. This can be due to their supply chain, activities that do not show up in the product itself (or process they are conducting). For firms like Walmart,  their direct impact on the footprint of their products is very small since they rely on a large and distributed supply chain for their business. So their efforts at sustainability indices for their major product groups is an attempt to get their arms around this (see http://walmartstores.com/Sustainability/9292.aspx).

But, most manufacturers are not like Walmart (not only in size of the business but manufacturers actually make things.) So the distribution of impacts over scope may be different, or similar, but relate to different aspects of the supply chain both into and out of your facility. It will look a lot more like Ricoh's comet circle we've spoken of in the past. And, things like employee travel to/from work, and purchased materials or other outsourcing, can be big impacts. But, if you are going to be held accountable for the contributions of these impacts as part of your product "footprint", then you want to be aware of these, and work with your suppliers and distributors to make sure the impact is known (that is quantified), and minimized. This 'minimization' can take any of the paths we've been discussing from reduced materials, or substituted materials, to lean processes, to reduced energy operation, to recycling and waste minimization, etc. Makes the ideas of video conferencing rather than flying around the world look more attractive for reasons besides economy!

If we add a future Scope 4 to the analysis, that is, how your customer uses or consumes your product and what happens to it when it is at its end of life, we can see our "leverage" on our product's or process' impact further reduced. Of course, for Walmart and similar companies, Scope 4 may be the major impact since everything they sell goes into the hands of consumers and will eventually find itself back in the reuse, recovery or disposal stage.

This is where some of the "steps to sustainability" mentioned in an earlier posting and seen on some of the websites and process or system analysis tools will come into play. We'll be talking a lot more about "steps" (that is beyond my rather skeptical review some postings ago - see October 7th posting, http://green-manufacturing.blogspot.com/2009/10/12-steps-are-only-first-steps.html). In my graduate class recently completed I had the students do a homework on "steps to sustainability" by searching for and categorizing information on the web in this topic area. The energy and enthusiasm of some 30 students attacking this problem is hard to beat! The results were very informative. But this is for a future posting.

Finally, under the "things that need poking at" category a word about greenwashing. You'll recall that this describes the practice of companies disingenuously spinning their products and policies as environmentally friendly" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwash and  the July 30 posting - http://green-manufacturing.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-green-manufacturing-part-4-some.html).

I was reading a travel magazine I get as a user of a credit card and there was a side bar article on a resort location in Northern California titled "Who's the greenest of them all?" The article was sprinkled with the terms "green" and "sustainable" so I had to read this. Well, needless to say, their concept was somewhat different than what we've been speaking of here. Materials in construction used for reclaimed wine-barrels (ok- that's good), run the resort on geothermal, solar and grid electricity (not bad - but I believe they get their power from the same public utility I do so I can claim the same "mix"), but then we get to the "other part." Large rooms with lots of amenities, outdoor and indoor steam baths for the guests, mud wraps and hot-stone rubdowns - the whole works and a gourmet kitchen to boot. Maybe they have the little sign in the bathroom about reusing your towels to help save the planet.

This could be sustainable but I'd need to see the power consumption "balance of trade", the operating resource and material consumption data - you know - everything we've been speaking about with respect to sustainable, or at least green, businesses. Of course the guests and staff at this spa drive in from some distance so there goes your Scope 3 and 4 impact! Point is - if you are going to bandy the terms about, please be prepared to back them up with some data. Did I mention the rooms are "from" $300 a night? Now that's a nice definition of green!

Happy New Year!

Green Balancing

Knowledge is useful. This may not sound surprising coming from an academic. Or, if not knowledge, then at least start with data.  As we have been discussing in the last few postings, data and knowledge are critical to decision making on the shop floor. The more information you have the easier it is to understand what is going on and what you should do next. And, this simple statement lays out the basic strategy to green manufacturing - at any level.

The webinar just held on December 14th (see Future State Solutions website http://futurestatesolutions.com/ for archived material) covered some of the tradeoffs between lean strategies of reducing cost, lead time and waste and natural resource and energy use and carbon emissions while at the same time insuring that process capability is maintained (and product quality insured) as well as safety and profit margins. We also spoke about the need to include all the Scope 1 through 3 effects to insure that a full picture of your process or product impact is reflected in your analysis and decision making. For a refresher on that see August 25th posting - http://green-manufacturing.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html which discusses the three scopes of ISO 14064 (1- direct emissions from on-site/company owned assets, 2- indirect emissions  from energy generation or supply, 3- all others resulting from your business operation including business travel, shipping of goods, resource extraction and product disposal).

So - the data requirements can be over a broad range of your operations.

At a deeper level, reflecting our discussions in the last two postings, with data we can look at optimization of performance. Here we discuss this from the perspective of "balancing" resource use. I would like to go into two examples: balancing the operation of multiple machines in a production line and multi capability vs single use machines. In the December 9th posting I went into some detail about the operational peculiarities of a machine tool for illustrating how variations in process parameters could affect energy and resource consumption. The previous posting, December 3rd, defines some of the "in the box" inputs in a process, like a machine tool.

Being good engineers, we often try to coordinate (or synchronize) the actions in a production system so that all processes are operating at the same time completing their tasks. At the end of the cycle time the product, in whatever state of completion along the line is, is advanced to the next station for the next operation. Except for the bottleneck station (the one which, due to complexity or number of operations on the station, uses all the cycle time) there is usually some idle time at each station. Lean techniques try to eliminate this as much as possible but, usually, some still exists.

One solution is to adjust the start/stop time of each process at a station so that, when the line is humming along, all the process steps do not exactly occur at the same time. When all synchronized the energy usage of the line will be at a maximum. If they are staggered a bit, but not so much as to lengthen cycle time, decrease throughput or affect quality, we might be able to shave a bit off the "peak power consumption" of the line. The illustration below shows how this might work (and you might need to click on the illustration for a larger view).

This can have a significant impact on the line and, if applied to other aspects of the factory operations, the overall factory energy use. And it is free. But, you need to be able to see the energy variation within the process cycle so that you know how to stagger the process start/stops.

Another strategy, not so much balancing as compounding, is to look at the potential for multi-function machines. You might recall the discussion in the November 18th posting (http://green-manufacturing.blogspot.com/2009/11/is-green-lean-part-ii-of-iii-part.html) on "smart assembly" and the new multipurpose machine introduced for automotive production. The vendors of this smart machine touted a smaller footprint and faster changeover to each product variation (lean!). This strategy also can save energy and embedded resources (green!). There are a number of machinery builders who are introducing multipurpose machines...specially for machining processes.

If one takes a hypothetical production system with a number of separate conventional machine tools - say for drilling, turning, horizontal and vertical milling applications - and replaces them with one machine that is able to do all these processes, in one set up, with cycle time reductions thanks to reduced part handling, fixturing, etc., it can be argued that, in addition to time, we'll save energy and resources. Then, each process energy input, embedded energy and resources for each machine, embedded energy and resources and operational energy in the handling machinery are all collapsed into one machine. Granted, the machine is more complex - but, one machine never-the-less. The figure below shows this hypothetical comparison (and you'll need to enlarge this one for sure!).

The red line tracks the individual process machines in a sequence. The line goes up to the right to reflect the process energy and the "jump" is the handling machinery impact. The green line shows the operation of the multi-machine. And the hashed green box illustrates the energy savings. Likely cycle time savings are seen as well. Granted this is a simplified illustration but the potential savings are real. And this is an excellent example of one of those "technology" wedges that's been referred to before.

These two examples, one that is for existing machinery and requires little additional cost, and the second when machinery is replaced, are both enabled thanks to data on the process operation at the lowest level. And we can build other efficiencies on top of this.

In the next blog  we'll talk a bit more about Scopes 1, 2, 3 (and 4?).

And happy holidays!