The Green Factory

This book proposes a new model, the Lean and Green Business Model (L&GBM), where the environmental aspect of sustainability is integrated with Lean thinking in order to create a way of thinking that contributes to and balances the three sustainability dimensions of people, profit, and planet. The model presented uses a kaizen approach that will help readers improve mass and energy flows in manufacturing environments that already possess a deployment level in applying Lean.

The Green Factory: Creating Lean and Sustainable Manufacturing tells the story of how GKN, a major British multinational corporation with operations in more than 30 countries, developed and implemented a Lean and Green Business Model in two of its automotive facilities in Brazil. It provides practical insight into how GKN was able to develop and deploy Lean and Green in a manner that resulted in environmental and cost benefits in the automotive facilities that operated in Brazil’s high-inflation environment.

Detailing proven concepts and sustainable models derived from the first-hand experiences, the book supplies information against the backdrop of GKN’s automotive manufacturing environment. The authors take an inside-out approach, describing the real issues Environmental Health & Safety professionals face when implementing sustainable manufacturing policies.

The book covers the corporate issues of balancing profit with environmental concern and the behavioral issues of engaging the workforce to identify and reduce environmental waste. All the concepts and models presented in the book have come about through the authors’ real life experiences in live kaizen events as well as their extensive academic research in the subject area.