Category: Solid Waste

Lean and Green Improvement for the Whole Supply Chain

A large retail business was looking to reduce its environmental impact throughout the entire supply chain (from raw material production to product manufacturing to distribution and sales throughout the UK), and reached out to S A Partners and Keivan Zokaei for assistance, using their Lean and Green approach. They selected a single Stock Keeping Unit
Continue Reading

20 Lean and Green organizations share environmental successes

The best way to convince your management to embrace sustainability is to show the success of others, especially competitors and customers who are doing the right thing. Pamela Gordon has compiled success stories from 20 international organizations in her book, Lean and Green: Profit For Your Workplace and the Environment. The companies highlighted in the
Continue Reading

Saving the equivalent of 4.5 million bottles of milk at Arla Foods

Arla Foods UK supplies a full range of fresh dairy products to the major retailers and foodservice customers, such as Cravendale, Anchor, Lurpak and Tickler. The intervention team led by Keivan Zokaei began by looking at waste at a very high level through the creation of a mass balance (or system boundary map) of all
Continue Reading
recycled content packaging minimal

Design for the Environment (DfE) and why your company needs to jump on board

Product designers have many different requirements and stakeholders to consider. Design for the Environment (DfE) criteria may appear to be just another set of considerations or requirements that the designer needs to balance and optimize. However, it is quickly becoming one of the more important considerations, and should be highlighted and tracked closely as a
Continue Reading

No one likes taxes, except for some environmentalists

The more I study solutions to our environmental issues, the more I get frustrated with our economic structure. The answer is pretty simple, but we fail to make any progress on it. Align our purchased price of an item with the true cost. If oil and coal have a negative impact on the environment, then
Continue Reading

Does bottled water actually taste better? Attribute Agreement Analysis

In order to answer this question, we setup an experiment to see if people could tell the difference between four different types of water (Filtered Tap Water, Fiji©, Zephyrhills© and a generic brand purchased at 7-11©). Fiji© Zephyrhills© 7-11© Generic Filtered Tap Water Each person was given a sample of the four waters at the
Continue Reading

Rockwell Collins goes green with LEED buildings

I had the opportunity to tour one of the LEED certified buildings on the Rockwell Collins campus in Cedar Rapids, IA. The older building of the two is Gold certified, and the newer one is Silver. At the beginning of the project, they discovered that many LEED buildings cost around $250 per square foot. They
Continue Reading

Is Lean Green? Is This The Right Question?

In an article written in the Lean Management Journal in March 2010 (Issue 3, March/April), author Keivan Zokaei discusses how companies are making the connection between their Lean and continuous improvement and the sustainability movement driven by their customers, owners and employees. He makes the following statements: You can read the entire article at https://web.archive.org/web/20160815134541/http://leanandgreenbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Is-Lean-Green.pdf

Kinnick Stadium recycling needs a boost

While watching my Iowa Hawkeyes finish off an incredible football season, I began to think about how much trash gets generated at a sporting event. Although I realize that the 70,000 people who attend the games were probably going to generate “some” amount of trash that day, even if they didn’t go to a game,
Continue Reading