It seems that with oil nearing $140 a barrel, everyone is suddenly excited about improving efficiencies across the board in the world of transportation and fuels. Applying Lean to a process, whether it's the manufacturing of cars or the method of refining fuel used to run those cars, is the best way to find new efficiencies. Of course, any Lean efficiency in energy use or transport that reduces fossil fuel use has an immediate Green payoff, too.
On the subject of Lean, Green, and fossil fuels, this article from the always excellent Cleantech.com describes a very lean-sounding new process for growing biofuels. There's been no shortage of press releases from startups touting breakthroughs in the biofuels arena, especially those interested in producing biodiesel from algae. Lean applications help this latest announcement from the stealthy Algenol Biofuels stand out from the crowd, although the fact that the company already has an $850 million project in the works to bring the product to market doesn't hurt either.
Most algal biofuel companies have focused on growing strains of algae that produce fats as a byproduct of their growth. The fats are then refined into biodiesels which can be used in diesel-fueled engines or as a heating oil. It's a promising arena, but the process generally requires tremendous amounts of fresh water, open space, and sunlight. Open space and sunlight are easy to find -- just go to the desert. But finding fresh water in the desert is a bit of a challenge, and even if you can get the water you have to transport the fuel from the desert to your customer base somewhere else.
Algenol took a look at the process and decided it made more sense to use seawater for its growing medium. There are plenty of deserts that border on oceans, including the Sonora desert in Mexico where its first facility is planned. Another advantage of locating a facility on the coast is that the transport of the fuel to market is easily accomplished by using the existing tanker fleet, a much more efficient method than using trucks. By making the switch from fresh water to seawater, the company has found a way to rid itself of a relatively expensive and scarce input (fresh water) while at the same time shortening its supply chain. That seems very Lean to me.
But the big Lean standout is that instead of refining fats into biodiesel, the Algenol process has used naturally occurring algae that turn the sugars they're fed directly into ethanol, with no refining step needed. Since the Leanness of this move might not be apparent to everyone at first glance, I'll use some phrases from the Lean Manufacturing Glossary to explain myself--I'm not trying to drop buzzwords, just trying to phrase this in a way the Lean audience can understand.
If you were to value-stream map the entire manufacturing process of any fuel, whether it was biofuel or fossil fuel, you would see a large step in the middle called "refining." Until now, refining fuel has been absolutely unavoidable--you can't burn crude oil in your car or feed algae-based lipids directly to your truck's diesel engine. Any Lean improvements to the process would probably look at how to improve the refining process. But Algenol has taken a higher-level view. In a sort of a large-scale Kaizen exercise, the company has found a way to eliminate the refining step. What was once an essential but expensive part of the manufacturing process is now just so much Muda. I'd imagine that for a lot of people in the world of oil, eliminating the refinery is a big paradigm shift.
Here we have an example of a company that seems to have taken a Kaizen approach from the very beginning. The company looked at what it was trying to produce - biofuels - and eliminated as many unnecessary steps as it could. Compared to the process of corn or cellulosic based ethanol, which is shockingly inefficient, it appears that they've succeeded. Compared to other algal biofuels, they've switched a scarce resource - fresh water - for an abundant one -sea water - while eliminating the refining step and minimizing the supply chain expenses. From a waste-reduction standpoint, it looks like they've found a beneficial reuse for the majority of their process wastes. The only outputs seem to be ethanol, fresh water, and the nitrogen-rich dead cell bodies, which can be used to replace fossil-fuel based nitrogen fertilizers. And of course, by taking waste CO2 from other companies, they're closing an important loop and setting themselves up for financial gain if the CO2 trading market finally becomes a reality.
All of this isn't to say there aren't some important questions that haven't been answered. Off the top of my head, I'd like to know what the source of sugars that they are feeding these algae are. I'd also like to know the circumstances surrounding their Mexican land acquisition. The company claims that this is an unused desert wasteland, but that's rarely the case, as the desert has tremendous ecological value and there are almost certainly people who may be displaced to worry about. Finally, I'd like to know more about the real energy balance, since they are awfully shy on details. I note that the process involves a small power plant, but the feedstock for this power plant isn't clear. Will it be running of the ethanol they're producing? But these questions and others aside, I'll remain cautiously optimistic and congratulate the company for coming up with a Lean and Green approach to tackling some of our most pressing problems.
This week is National Drinking Water Week! If that doesn't excite you, think about the Lean implications of this dreadful story about the deaths of 80 children last month in South Africa resulting from a breakdown in the local drinking water treatment plant. While everyone involved is busy pointing fingers at everyone else, I think a little digging would turn up plenty of opportunities for Lean--error-proofing, anyone?
Drinking water and wastewater treatment are the two crowning achievements in public health for our species--arguably more important than vaccines and antibiotics. We tend not to think about these plants until something goes wrong, which is fortunately not very often here in the US. But just because our water infrastructure tends to stay out of the news doesn't mean there's not plenty of room for Lean.
The state of Arizona recently handed down a fine to a local water company after an important water-purification system broke down and the company failed to act quickly to remedy the issue. The background is that Motorola and other unnamed companies managed to contaminate the local groundwater supply with TCE, a carcinogenic solvent used to clean grease off machines, several decades ago. The water utility is supposed to remove the TCE down to an acceptable level. The TCE-removal equipment failed, and the alarm that was supposed to let people know about the failure failed, and no one noticed for 16 hours. To make matters worse for the company, management decided not to notify the authorities until 9 hours after that, and in the subsequent investigation it came out that they were just dumping the TCE they'd removed back into a storm drain. The state cited a poorly designed system (PDF) and ordered changes to make sure it didn't happen again--a very Lean approach. Motorola, on the hook for some of the costs of the cleanup, says it was human error:
Operator error is blamed for a malfunction in January at a plant owned and operated by the Arizona American Water Co. that treats groundwater contaminated with trichloroethylene, a suspected cancer-causing chemical.
That is the conclusion of an investigation conducted for Motorola Inc. and other companies that were the source of the TCE contamination decades ago. The companies are paying for cleanup of the contaminated groundwater, including the treatment facility.
A separate investigation done for Arizona American concluded that the plant's systems and components were not designed or operated in an optimal manner.
So what's the solution? Well, the first thing I would say is that the most holistic Lean approach would be to reduce Scottsdale's water use to the point where they could discontinue use of these two contaminated wells. That's the most environmentally friendly thing to do, especially given Scottsdale's location in the middle of a desert. Coming down a level, Greenpeace has been hammering Motorola recently for continuing to use toxic chemicals in its products, although some of the more recent news (PDF) shows that the company is making some progress towards a toxin-free product line. As I noted in my last post, Lean practitioners can play a big part for the environment by urging their clients to get away from toxic chemicals. Finally, it looks like the state is pushing the facility in question to be a bit leaner, but I'm sure there is plenty of additional work that could be done to make this facility both more Lean and more green.
As a regular part of my job, I visit large industrial sites (mostly sewage treatment plants-yum!). This means that I have to have an OSHA certification in worker safety. Every year, my employer hires a trainer to give us an 8-hour health and safety refresher so that our OSHA certification will be valid. It's the same guy every year, and he does a good job of trying to keep it fresh for us by changing his presentations. Usually this means lots of gross-out pictures of people with burns, snakebites, and various amputations, interspersed with humorous clips of worker safety from shows like Saturday Night Live.
This year, he showed us a couple of minutes from a disturbing documentary called Bhopal: The Search for Justice. Without delving into the specifics of this truly horrifying tale of politics and greed, let's just say it was a nice segue for him to then get us to take a look at the NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards that he'd placed on every table. As we took a quick quiz to see if we could use the guide to correctly identify the proper personal protective gear we'd need in case we had to deal with a spill of Ethylene bromide or Methyl isocyanate (the chemical that killed perhaps 4,000 people in Bhopal), I couldn't help thinking that something is seriously wrong with the way we make things in modern industrial society.
The NIOSH guide contains information on 677 chemicals or groups of chemicals. Every single one of these chemicals, by virtue of its inclusion in the guide, is hazardous to human health or safety. But the chemicals listed in the guide are only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of chemical compounds that are floating around out there, the really bad ones that can kill thousands of people instantly if something goes wrong. The guide doesn't list the more insidious ones, like the current chemical-of-the-month, bisphenol A, or BPA. BPA is found in all kinds of plastics that are supposed to be food safe, like Nalgene bottles and baby bottles. But--surprise, surprise--it turns out that this is yet another barely pronounceable chemical that might not be good for you.
McDonough and Braugart spent a good chunk of their book Cradle to Cradletaking a hard look at the chemical industry. They wanted to know why so many industries insisted on using nasties like methyl isocyanate (used in the manufacture of rubber products and adhesives) and BPA even though these products certainly offer no value to the end user. The ability of my rubber cement manufacturer to kill a couple of thousands of people is not a selling point for me any more than the chance that you might increase your child's risk of cancer is a selling point when you're choosing a baby bottle. The usual excuse is that "it costs too much" to find an alternative, but we all know that's a pretty flimsy excuse.
Enter Lean. Most of these manufacturers are looking at the cost of the individual compounds they have to purchase to make their products. The safety measures that went into building the plants are sunk costs, and the decision-makers at the top are hard-pressed to see how experimenting with something that works is good for them. To complicate matters, to change their practices might mean admitting that they were doing something wrong, something bad for human health and the environment, in the first place. But a good Lean practitioner should be able to guide management towards greener chemical practices.
When you take away a toxic chemical and replace it with a green alternative, the cost of the substitute can't be the only comparison. What about the costs of all the associated Tyvek suits and specialty gloves? What about the fire-suppression system that can now be deactivated? What about the lower insurance bills for your employees and the reduced sick-time that comes from working with these chemicals? The elimination of the need to train people to safely work with these chemicals and the commensurate regulatory burden? The costly wastewater treatment system to handle the leftovers? The air-purifiers, the odor control complaints, and the explosion hazards that come from working with VOCs?
As we face mounting evidence that the thousands of chemicals we're using in manufacturing today are bad for the environment and for human health, either individually or in the aggregate, there are fewer and fewer excuses to carry on with business as usual. As the corals continue to die, and cancer rates continue to rise, it's time that we finally get industry on board with green chemistry, what the LA Times calls a Green Revolution. Regulation alone won't fix this problem--we need real buy-in from the industrial and manufacturing sectors. That's where Lean practitioners can really help.
Next time you find yourself in the field, whether a hospital or a factory, take a look around at the various chemicals in use and ask if there is a way you could use Lean to help replace them with a green alternative. If you're not sure where to start, why not check out the Cradle to Cradle folks' list of certified C2C products? For a more detailed take on what a traditional product could look like after it's been Leaned and Greened, here's a great write-up of a mattress company that's not only eliminated the polyurethane and formaldehyde common in our beds, but has also figured out a great way to reduce wasted energy and space in shipping the mattresses (let's just hope the bed's comfortable).
By the way, the NIOSH guide could use a complete revamp from Edward Tufte. Most of the highly trained professionals in that room failed to correctly identify the proper safety gear and/or hazards for at least 2 or 3 of the 10 compounds we were supposed to identify, even when working in teams of 2 or 3. It's not that we didn't care, it's that the guide is very hard to read, full of abbreviations, footnotes, asterisks, and involving lots of page-flipping. It's not something I'd want to rely on in an emergency, and I'm sure that the error-proofing crowd out there could find plenty of ways to improve this.
Google made headlines last year when it announced it that it was going to devote a significant chunk of cash to developing renewable energy that was cheaper than coal (the RE eSolar, a small startup that appears to be applying Lean principles to the thorny problem of how to bring the high costs of solar electricity down.)
First, a solar primer. There are two ways to make electricity with solar power. The high-tech way is through solar photovoltaic panels (aka solar PV). These are the panels that Google installed on the roof of its Mountain View campus, and although they turn solar energy directly into electric energy, they're still ridiculously expensive to produce. There's also some concern that the technology used to produce this "clean" power isn't necessarily so clean.
The second method of converting solar power to electricity is to concentrate the rays of the sun using mirrors. These mirrors usually focus on a central tower, which collects the heat and uses it to boil water, which turns a steam turbine to produce electricity. That's pretty much the way a coal-fired power plant works, only without the coal. And although this is cheaper and easier than solar PV, it's still not cost-competitive with coal.
Enter eSolar. The steps they've taken sure sound a lot like Lean. From an excellent article on Cleantech.com today, here are some key quotes:
"We can build these units smaller. This lets us build closer to cities. It lets us avoid some of the traditional roadblocks associated with large transmission projects," Robert Rogan, exec. VP of corporate development at eSolar, told Cleantech.com...."And we've got the ability to scale this very rapidly through our existing manufacturing."
Hear any Lean concepts in this approach? This also crosses over into Bright Green environmental concepts, because shorter supply lines mean less waste and less infrastructure.
Google has said it believes it needs to get in the range of 1 to 3 cents per kilowatt hour for solar or other renewables to be competitive with coal....Rogan said his company has been very cost conscious. The company said its heliostat mirrors, designed to track the sun, were made to fit into shipping containers to keep transportation costs low, and are pre-assembled at the factory to minimize on-site labor.
More signs of Lean, although I'd like to see something in this about respect for people.
"Minimizing the shipping costs on the hardware is just one example of that very tightly cost-based approach to designing," said Rogan...."Our towers are very short. This, again, makes them very easy to assemble on site, faster to install, and ultimately much lower cost than building a 30-story skyscraper," he said. The company has also cut the amount of steel and concrete used in its systems by keeping the heliostats small and low to the ground, reducing their wind profile.
Again, a nice intersection of Lean and Bright Green. Besides the inherent "greenness" of a solar project, they've figured out how to do more with less.
"Another nice benefit of this pre-fab, modular, scalable approach is that we can incorporate, in the future, all varieties of storage." "Currently, we're not discussing our specific storage plans, except to say that we don't view it as being a barrier to entering the market," he said.
This somewhat resembles the flexible workspace approach of Lean. You can read a bit more about the company's lean approach here.
All in all, it's great to see Lean and Green integrated in such a fashion. Hopefully there will be a lot more of this kind of thing coming soon. Happy Earth Day, everyone!
China's everywhere in the news these days. It seems like you can't open a newspaper (or a feed reader) without reading an article about the summer Olympics, its booming economy, the situation in Tibet, and growing unease over the environmental consequences of China industrializing in the same way the US and Europe did. To capture the moment for us, National Geographic ran an excellent special on the Wenzhou region of China, home to a huge chunk of the world's commodity manufacturing sector. From buttons to bra straps, this is the new home of manufacturing, and as such it should be an area that's of equal interest to both Lean and Green thinkers.
The story follows a family-run manufacturing startup as it tries to break into the lucrative world of manufacturing bra rings (the part you struggled so hard to unclasp in high school) in the city of Lishui. It's simultaneously exhilarating and depressing. On the one hand, there is this spirit of unbridled entrepreneurialism of the sort that made the internet bubble so exciting. On the other hand, in their mad dash to industrialize the entrepreneurs and their complicit government leaders are duplicating many of our worst mistakes. This is not a story of flow, or the elimination of waste, or of respect for land and people. Instead, this is the story of a region that celebrates the best and worst of unregulated capitalism.
The family leases a facility in a brand-new industrial development, built in the least environmentally sensitive conceivable manner on land that's practically stolen from the peasants who are forced to sell it at below-market rates. The facility ramps up production on a commodity that's completely dependent on a machine that only one person really knows how to operate well, a machine that seems engineered to waste energy and a machine which constantly threatens to break down, bringing production to a halt. The same peasants who are no longer farming are now working 50 hour weeks for minimal pay. The factory starts production with no customers, amassing a huge backlog of product while it waits for sales to start up. And then, one day barely a year after it opened, its owners jump to an even newer development, leaving behind nothing but a legacy of waste.
What's so heartbreaking about this story is that Lean and Green both work so much better if they're applied from the start, in the design phase. But time and again, we see this kind of completely unplanned development. The business owners in this story, who don't have much of an education, aren't portrayed as the kind of people who think much past next week, certainly not the kind of people likely to embrace lean concepts or worry about the environment. The government officials pushing the new development along brag about the number of hills they've flattened and wetlands they've filled in the name of this development.
It's not explicitly stated in the story, but the impression is that any concession to forward-thinking practices, to environmental considerations, to an applied thoughtfulness in the way they do business, would be immediately written off as too expensive and impractical. But what's more expensive? Spending your increasingly thin profit margin on wasted energy? Moving your factory multiple times? Coming back in 40 years and trying to undo the environmental damage you've left behind?
I guess the larger question for the readers of this blog is how do you get people like this--business smart entrepreneurs who only understand the bottom line--on board with Lean? And at the same time, how do you convince the local governments that pushing development in a more sustainable manner will attract a better clientele, cost less over the long run, and be better for the citizenry? It seems to me that these are two sides of the same coin. Readers with experience in this kind of rapid-growth situation and/or Chinese manufacturing, please leave your thoughts in the comments.
In my first post a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the tension between what I called "new" and "old" environmentalism. Not that I had expected to be the first to notice this tension, but I was both pleasantly surprised and somewhat humbled when A Brighter Shade of Green floated through my field of view just days later. The article makes my point far better than I did, explaining how Bruce Sterling phrased the argument as the new "bright green" vs. the old "dark green." Ross Robertson is a much more talented writer than I am, and I hope you can find time to read the whole thing. In case you can't, here's a capsule summary:
Environmentalists have been struggling privately for years with their misanthropic side. There is a certain feeling in the movement that the planet might be better off without people and/or technology, and the mainstream media and our conservative foes have picked up on this unspoken tension and magnified it.
Being branded as misanthropes is a really lousy way to get buy-in from the people who can make a difference.
Like it or not, people now control the planet and every natural system on it. And so far, we're doing a really terrible job of running the show. In the words of Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame, “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.”
The people (especially Alex Steffen) at WorldChanging, a blog that holds a top spot on Google Reader, have taken up the bright green torch and are busy offering up solutions to the problems we're facing today.
The bright green movement is in danger of swinging too far the other way: "the greatest danger for bright green today seems to be that the very thing that makes it so progressive—its attempt to integrate postmodern ecological consciousness into the modernist project of economic and social progress—is the same thing that threatens to drag it backward into an overly materialistic orientation toward sustainability and global development."
The conclusion is that the movement will succeed if it can make room for spirituality, not a surprising conclusion since the article appeared in What is Enlightenment magazine.
With a close reading, Lean followers will find a lot to think about in the article. If you'll pardon my excessive use of bullet points, here are a few examples:
When he quotes former Sierra Club president Adam Werbach talking about Dark Green's unspoken misanthropy being "political suicide," Robertson might as well have been talking about the need for buy-in from top management (something the green movement has never had).
In discussing the utility of WorldChanging's ecological footprint approach to measuring our impact on the planet, there is a strong parallel to Lean's emphasis on performance measurement.
Robertson's capsule summary of Cradle to Cradle touches on Lean's foundation in the elimination of waste. C-to-C is entirely about eliminating waste.
The coverage of the stated benefits of the current rural-to-urban shift, especially for women in the developing world, is another way of talking about Lean's respect for people.
When Robertson says that "World changing advocates open-source models of design, copyright, and licensing that encourage collaboration, maximize the appropriateness of solutions in local contexts, and allow for uninhibited retooling of technologies to keep pace with evolving realities on the ground," he could just as easily have been describing Lean's reliance on Flexible Tools.
Talking about James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which views the earth as a single living superorganism, and the impact on earlier generations of seeing images of the earth from space for the first time, we can take a step back and relate to Lean's systems management approach.
It seems clear to me that there is a lot of room to apply Lean thinking as we develop our "Bright Green Future." Let me know what you think in the comments.
I'm Jason Turgeon, the newest addition to the Lean Blog team. Mark and I have had an email dialog going for a few months about the intersection of green and lean, and he's invited me to post on the topic. So over the next couple of months, I'll try to put about one post a week up discussing the link between these two topics, which are intrinsically linked at many levels.
But first, a brief introduction. My interest in lean comes from a lifelong fascination with innovation and improving systems. Before I discovered lean thinking, I made a nuisance of myself at many jobs, where I continually disrupted my bosses with constant suggestions for improvement and a somewhat over-the-top willingness to ask "why?" Now that I have the tools of lean to channel my energy into, I think I'm a good deal more effective in my daily efforts to make everything around me just a little bit more effective, but I am by no means an expert in lean systems. Lean is something I'm new to and I'm enjoying learning about it and looking forward to the chance to apply it.
I have a BS in Environmental Geology from Northeastern University in Boston, where I live. I work for the US Environmental Protection Agency, where I specialize in improving energy efficiency at drinking water and sewage treatment plants. EPA has done a fair amount of work to link green and lean, although it hasn't really caught on inside the agency yet. The agency is looking at lean both from a manufacturing perspective and with an eye to making government itself more efficient. I also run Textbook Revolution, a website I started in college to combat the ludicrously high prices of textbooks. The textbook game is another old world industry that could really benefit from some lean thinking, but that's a whole 'nother topic. I'm also a big fan of live music, and I write on the growing movement to green the music industry at GreenBase, the green blog of JamBase.com.
Subaru and Zero Landfill Status:
So now that you know who I am, let's dive in. This week's focus is on an article in the Feb 18th USA Today that Mark alerted me to. The article describes the efforts of a Subaru plant in Lafayette, Indiana, to eliminate waste from the factory, a quest known as "zero landfill status," and discusses several other companies doing the same thing. Of course, the elimination of waste is one-half of what lean is all about, so this fits in perfectly. The article quotes Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott:
Wal-Mart CEO Scott set a zero-waste goal for the cost-conscious retailer in 2005. "Think about it," he said at the time. "If we have to throw it away, we had to buy it first. So we pay twice. Once to get it, once to have it taken away."
To figure out how to eliminate waste, management took a page from the "go and see" playbook--they took all of the trash out of a dumpster and spread it out on the factory floor to get a sense of what they were throwing away. Then they went to work figuring out what could readily be recycled and what could be reused. They took steps to rightsize, like using a smaller roll of steel for parts that are stamped, reducing the leftover steel by over 100 pounds per car. Management also spent a lot of time designing systems to make recycling easier, like sorting all the plastic shrink-wrap together.
Subaru also went for the other aspect of lean--respect for people. The article says that the waste elimination program has reached "an almost religious fervor" among employees. Unfortunately, there is no discussion of just how the plant got this buy-in. In the same vein, the plant has worked extensively with its suppliers to coerce them into taking back reusable or recyclable materials. The styrofoam inserts that protect engine parts get used 5 times before they get recycled. And because many of their suppliers are close, often within an hour's drive, they are sending recyclables back in trucks that would have otherwise been empty, reducing waste in transportation as well.
"Old" and "New" Environmentalism
But what does all of this mean from an environmental perspective? To start answering that question, it helps to know that there are really two separate environmental camps out there, with dozens of splintered subfactions. The "old environmentalism," as I like to put it, was based on nagging and regulations. Old environmentalists are always pointing out what other people are doing wrong, begging government to pass more laws to restrict other people's behavior, and generally making life unpleasant for those around them. This is the group I work for. Old environmentalists are prone to saying things like, "if we could just convince every American to change one lightbulb to a compact fluorescent, we could save x, y, and z." To be brutally honest, it's not much fun to hang out with this group of people.
"New environmentalists," a group which I try very hard to be in, are much more closely aligned with lean thinkers. New environmentalists, inspired by books like Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution and Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, are constantly on the lookout for a better way to change the planet. Those of us in this camp would prefer to align economics and the environment, working withbusiness instead of trying to regulate it out of existence. Our arguments for government intervention tend to be at the more macroeconomic level, for instance suggesting that we redesign tax laws to punish wasteful behavior and reward good behavior. New environmentalists believe in the concept of "sustainability" not as a poorly-understood buzzword but as a way of life, a game-changing philosophy in which everything we do, everything we buy, everything we use contributes in a positive way to the world, both now and in the future.
Subaru: Reducing Waste but still Wasteful?
Getting back to the question of Subaru's waste-reduction, I think that old environmentalists are probably very happy about Subaru's work. Why look--they've eliminated almost 100% of their waste! They have a very high recycling rate! They've done what we asked, and saved money in the process!
But from a new environmentalist perspective, Subaru's work is only the first baby step towards true sustainability. It's a good step, to be sure, and the company deserves praise and recognition for it, but if they stop there, it's not good enough. From our perspective, the stuff in the dumpster is just the tip of the waste iceberg. Cars are perhaps the single most visible element of a wasteful, unsustainable lifestyle, and as such are emblemic of the larger societal shifts we need to see if we're going to avoid some pretty painful global collapses in the not-too-distant future.
Let's look at the waste that's left in the system three ways. At the more granular level, cars are still woefully inefficient. Even a Toyota Camry Hybrid (this plant makes Camrys for Toyota, but the article doesn't say if the Hybrid is one of them) only gets about 30 mpg in real world driving. As the authors of Natural Capitalism put it:
The contemporary automobile, after a century of engineering, is embarrassingly inefficient: Of the energy in the fuel it consumes, at least 80 percent is lost, mainly in the engine's heat and exhaust, so that at most only 20 percent is actually used to turn the wheels. Of the resulting force, 95 percent moves the car, while only 5 percent moves the driver, in proportion to their respective weights. Five percent of 20 per-cent is one percent- not a gratifying result from American cars that burn their own weight in gasoline every year.
Natural Capitalism devotes an entire chapter to a discussion of how to make the automobile more efficient at delivering the service we want--comfortable, safe, reliable transportation--while at the same time using less natural resources. They argue that using steel doesn't make any sense in a modern automobile. Steel, to them is a "monument." By switching to modern plastics and carbon fiber, we could have cars that are just as safe, just as fast, and much, much more efficient, without having to do anything involving hybrids or biodiesel or hydrogen. Consider:
The conventional car is heavy, made mostly of steel. It has many protrusions, edges, and seams that make air flow past it turbulently. Its great weight bears down on tires that waste energy by flexing and heating up. It is powered by an internal combustion engine mechanically coupled to the wheels. Completely redesigning cars by reconfiguring three key design elements could save at least 70 to 80 percent of the fuel it currently uses, while making it safer, sportier, and more comfortable. These three changes are:
1. making the vehicle ultralight, with a weight two to three times less than that of steel cars;
2. making it ultra-low-drag, so it can slip through the air and roll along the road several times more easily; and
3. after steps 1 and 2 have cut by one-half to two-thirds the power needed to move the vehicle, making its propulsion system "hybrid-electric."
As you can see, there is a lot of waste left in the car. But what about what happens to the car when its useful life is over? Today, most automobiles end up in a metals recycling facility, where they are crushed and shredded. The economically useful metals are sorted for recycling, and everything else--the seatbelts, the plastic dashboard, the steering wheel, all the leftovers, collectively known as "fluff"--is trucked to a landfill. Making cars more efficient is a fantastic first step, but efficiency isn't the only end goal. In Cradle-to-Cradle, the argument is that being less bad is not the same as being good. They say that reducing the amount of waste is not good enough. In a properly designed system, one that mimics nature, there is no such thing as "waste."
The "C-to-C" take on auto manufacturing would have the Subaru plant churning out cars that were designed not to be shredded at the end of their lives, but to be dissassembled and turned back into new cars. BMW long ago started designing for disassembly, making it easier to take cars apart and reuse their components. The next logical step would be to figure out how to turn these parts, say the body panels from one car, back into top-quality body panels on a new car with a minimum of energy. The auto manufacturer that does this will have a huge competitive advantage. Why stamp out new steel doors for each car, at tremendous environmental and financial cost, if you could have a plastic door that was reconditioned using an environmentally benign painting process and put back into service on a new car at a fraction of the cost of a new steel door?
The third take on the Subaru factory, and the most extreme, is that the factory shouldn't be producing cars at all. Automobiles, as I've said, are emblemic of waste and over-consumption. If the rest of the world suddenly starts looking like America, we're going to be in a lot of trouble, fast. This has already begun in China and India, where they began by modeling their vision of success on our ways. As car ownership has spiked, transportation and infrastructure headaches, air pollution, water pollution, the destruction of land for roads and parking lots, and all the other negatives that come from automobiles have also risen.
The mayor of Bogota made worldwide news when he made strides to take back the city streets from cars and give them to people (see the video at the end of this post for an inspirational look at how things could be better). Now there are hundreds of miles of real bike lanes and pedestrian avenues--not a stripe on the side of the road, but full lanes off-limits to cars, separated from auto traffic by vegetated buffers. And every Sunday and holiday, the city shuts off dozens more miles of road to cars, opening them up to cyclists and pedestrians.
The more extreme environmentalists would say that no matter how little waste goes to the landfill, the factory is inherently wasteful. They would prefer to see it transformed into a factory that produces clean, modern, efficient, and comfortable public transportation. It could be light rail or it could be a bus that becomes part of a really useful bus system, one that people enjoy riding, like the one that transformed Curitiba, Brazil. Or it could be something new, something that none of us have thought of yet. But even if you don't agree with that point of view, there is still plenty of room to eliminate waste, both in the design of the car and the cars disposition when its useful life is over.
So kudos to Subaru for taking the first steps on the path to sustainability. Let's see if the company can follow through.
The purpose of this blog is to present news articles and commentary
on the following topics: the Toyota Production System, Lean Manufacturing
(aka Lean Production or Lean Enterprise), along with new applications
of lean such as Lean Healthcare. I also hope that this site will prompt
discussion and learning among lean manufacturing practitioners and
students (we're all on a lifelong lean learning journey). Thanks for
visiting.
I also hope to raise intelligent discussion about the current and
future competitive standing of U.S. manufacturing. As an American
manufacturing professional, I have a vested interest in this topic.
I believe in free trade, but I also believe that all manufacturers
should treat employees and workers fairly and humanely, as I believe
the Toyota Production System encourages us to do.
and 
, are constantly on the lookout for a better way to change the planet. 
