FROM WASTE TO (SOCIAL) WEALTH Government figures estimate that five million tonnes of plastic are used each year in the UK, half of this is packaging, and just 45% of it is recycled. The impact of human activity on the environment will be the topic of the next decade and businesses will have to consider how they will adapt to neutralise their environmental impact. Written by: Steve Wilson, Managing Director, Unipart Expert Practices
Mark Carney, Special Envoy to the UN on Climate Change and Finance, warns “Companies and industries that are not moving towards zerocarbon emissions will be punished by investors and go bankrupt”. Businesses already use ‘social value’ reporting to push environmental narratives which are tied to measurable actions and results. However, it’s one thing to have the metrics and targets in place, but how will companies deliver the change that is needed?
How do you take out waste? One approach to business improvement is ‘Lean’. Lean originated from Japanese manufacturing and focuses on eliminating ‘waste’ from business
activities, serving to improve Safety, Quality, Cost or Lead time of processes. These wastes are traditionally the activities carried out by people, that consume resources (adding cost) and create no significant value for the customer. Typically, eight wastes are sought out for removal, these are: Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Over-processing, Defects & untapped human Skills. The Unipart Group, an Oxfordshire headquartered company, has developed Lean thinking into a core part of its philosophy, ‘the Unipart Way’. Their approach is to empower and engage employees to drive continuous improvement across operations and customer supply chains. Unipart’s consultancy
Process 1 Goods in from suppliers
Process 2
business successfully uses this philosophy to help organisations across the world achieve change via ‘Lean transformation’ activities. This is no mean feat – traditionally a significant proportion of change programmes do not sustain their results for long. To overcome this, Unipart rely on a toolkit of techniques. The first of these techniques is to implement ‘Standard Work’ to ensure that all types of operations run in a safe, repeatable, reliable and capable way. This includes identifying and removing waste across all operations from supplier to customer (the ‘Value Stream’). Producing the Value Stream Map (VSM) is followed by the use of a combination of tools that closely examine processes to find bottlenecks and
Process 3
Analysis to determine resources consumed and waste and emissions produced across the production or service delivery value stream
Identification and removal of waste through problem solving and process trials
Energy Water Water Raw-materials RawRa w-ma ate teriial als Non-recyclables NonNon No n-re recy cy ycllab abl ble les les Emissions Emis Emi Em issi sion ion ons s
Product out to customers
0.15KWh energy reduction per unit produced 5.3l reduction perr uni unit produced 5 .3l 3l off water red ductiion pe p it p rod duced d 153g scrap metal unit 15 53g 3g iincrease nc cre eas ase e in in s c ap m cr ettal al rrecycled ecyc ec yclle yc led pe perr un u itt reduction Single Plastics 95% 95 % re red duct du cti tio ion in ion in S ingl in gle Us Use Pl Use Plas asti as tics ti cs NA
Fig 1.
Figure 1: Visualising the waste that a Value Stream Map could help identify for removal through process optimisation
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