How to make waste reduction a priority

In our current economy manufacturing is one of the biggest sources of pollution and wasted energy. In fact manufacturing accounts for about 25% of the energy used each year in the United States. But aside from all of the energy it consumes manufacturing often leads to pollution because most of the energy that is used in manufacturing is obtained via combustion processes from coal, coke, natural gases, oil, and waste which generate a lot of harmful greenhouse gases. No matter which kind of manufacturing you are doing it is going to create some type of pollution because of the amount and type of waste that is produced. But that is where green manufacturing comes in, by making a few small changes you can help make your manufacturing plant more environmentally friendly.

But that is not the only way that manufacturing is causing waste. Many manufacturing plants have a lot of product waste, whether it is from inferior manufacturing techniques or poor quality manufacturing. But if you are in manufacturing you are going to want to make waste reduction a high priority so that you are better using your resources, which in the long run will help the company overall.

Difficulty rating: Difficult

Step one: The first thing that you are going to need to do to make waste reduction a priority is to figure out where the waste is coming from. To do this you are going to want to look at the various departments and perform inspections on all of the departments to see what kind of waste reductions they can make, which means seeing where they can improve their manufacturing.

Step two: The next thing that you are going to need to do is to start the priority of waste reduction from the top down. What this means is that you are going to want to get the executives of the company and upper management to lead by example.

Step three: The next thing that you are going to need to do is to have a staff meeting with all of the various department heads to discuss what you have found and see if they have any ideas on how they can improve their manufacturing process. This is where you are going to want to talk to the department heads about what you are planning on doing about waste reduction and why you are making it a priority.

Step four: The next thing that you are going to need to do is to implement some of your plans that are going to be used for waste reduction. One of the key things to remember here is to introduce the ideas in one section at a time so that you can work out the bugs before making it a company wide policy. This will also help to ensure a successful program within your company.

Step five: Now that you have your manufacturing programs implemented you might also want to take a moment to think about reducing the amount of waste that your manufacturing plant is contributing to the environment and about ways that you can reduce that waste as well. If you look at the company as a whole there are plenty of opportunities for you to implement green manufacturing so that you can reduce the amount of waste and pollution your company is putting out.

Other tips:

• One program that you can implement is lean manufacturing. This program will help reduce the amount of waste that is associated with the products due to poor quality.
• A great way to go green is to use recycled products for your packaging. This will help reduce the amount of waste that is in the landfill and can lower your costs because you are not using new materials each time, and everyone knows that recycled products are cheaper to buy than new products.
• Something else that you can do to help eliminate waste in manufacturing is to implement pull-production manufacturing. This allows you to only make enough of a product that the customer is going to need, which will help reduce the waste of the unused products.