Ok, a bit of a cheat with the “F” for factories because this week’s article is not just about factories, but all sites in your own operations. The truth is, I want to use O for something else!
Typically, all environmental sustainability activity starts at your own operations. Any physical place you own and operate will use energy and water and create waste, and it is in these areas where the focus tends to be. In carbon terms (see “C is for carbon footprinting”) this is your scope 1 and 2. You have direct control and can take all the decisions needed to make changes.
Firstly, with water, there are a couple of aspects: how much fresh water you use; and what state the water is in when it leaves your sites. Water reduction is often not top of the list because the price we pay for water is relatively cheap and we don’t view it as scarce resource (at least not until hose pipe bans are introduced in the summer). But it is scarcer than we realise and in an industrial context we need to make sure that water use in factories isn’t in conflict with drinking water supply or supplies for agriculture.
The quality of the water in our rivers is currently a huge focus in the UK. The attention has been on the water companies, but industry and agriculture are also part of the problem, and companies’ focus should be on ensuring that wastewater entering water courses does not contaminate in any way. In many parts of the world, rainwater harvesting can be part of the answer to reducing water use, particularly for aspects such as washing equipment or ground maintenance, but it can also be treated and purified enough to be used in certain products too.
With waste, as well as looking for overall reductions, you should also be looking to stop waste entering landfill and paying particular attention to any hazardous waste you produce with a view to eliminating it wherever possible. Increasingly stopping using single-use plastic and reducing plastics overall should be included in your plans.
With energy and emissions, the focus should be about reducing energy, installing on-site renewables, and contracting for the supply of off-site renewables. It’s helpful to think of investigating these activities in order as if you use less energy, you will need to spend less on the other two areas, but in practice, all three activities will be implemented in an overlapping way.
What connects all three areas is that the plans to reduce them need to include capital or operating expenditure but also behaviour and process change. The latter can often be overlooked but can be some of the quickest and cheapest first steps for reduction.
At a simple level some personal behavioural changes can make meaningful impacts, such as not washing hands under running taps, choosing not to print documents or if you do, using double sided, choosing to wear an extra layer to delay putting the heating on or keeping external doors to warehouses closed when not in use. These can also be backed up by company actions or policies to strengthen their application.
But often more impactful are process changes. Simply scheduling production differently way can mean that pipework doesn’t need to be washed down as much, resulting in less waste (for example by making black paint after grey paint and not white). Or taking a particular pack size out of the range can improve filling efficiency. Or changing some raw material from bags to bulk can reduce waste. Or talking to customers about only ordering in full pallet quantities to get efficiencies in warehousing and transportation.
There are numerous examples, but finding what will work in your operations will need conversations with people on the ground. You’ll need to encourage them to think differently about how things can be done, often challenging long-established practices in the business. It is amazing how things become engrained in companies and how people can not feel empowered to challenge things they see to be inefficient every day. I have seen one case where a factory had to deal with ninety-two different lids for containers for various products they were producing. Many of them were simply different colours or had different logos printed on them. This created a huge amount of complexity in storage and production. When we laid this out for the marketing team they had no idea. Each product manager did their own thing with no overall commercial oversight. But the factory had never challenged it because they believed that their job was to do what they were told by marketing. By getting everyone round the table, complexity, waste, and costs were reduced without any impact on sales at all. This takes us back to the last article on engagement (E is for Engagement) – get everyone involved and challenge people to do things differently and they will have many more ideas than you would ever have thought. And they’ll take considerable pride from doing it.
Of course, capital and operational expenditure will also be a factor in your plans. You’ll have to decide if you proactively upgrade equipment or just wait for the natural upgrade cycle. You’ll also need to consider whether this is simply a cost benefit case using the investment criteria you already use in the business, or whether you are going to favour expenditure on sustainability improvement in some way. You could do this by lengthening the payback period for cases that reduce waste, water, energy, or emissions, or by setting aside a different pot of money for such activities. For emissions you could also use an additional carbon price in your investment cases. However you do it, make sure that you engage with people to encourage cases to be brought to the table. Often people have seen investment knocked back over the years and so self-filter projects before submission. You need to be able to see the art of the possible and then challenge from a sustainability perspective what priorities should be. If your business is particularly capital constrained it’s even more important that you get an early win under your belt to show that things can change.
I’d recommend bringing all elements together as an overall plan for reduction for each of the areas. This will help prioritisation, communication and to plan a multi-year activity. You can use this to set targets or to see a future forecast against existing targets.
Measurement is key. It’s worth going back to the start to check that all sites are measuring the same things, with the same definitions and at the same frequency. A commonality of data will be more accurate, but critically will allow you to monitor and review in a common way and to compare across sites. I’d always suggest data is collected monthly and that someone centrally reviews it monthly. That way people see it is being used and challenged – there is nothing worse that going through the hassle of submitting data only to find that no one looks at it, or at best once a year when they pull it together for the annual report. Go back to people monthly questioning why trends have changed, partly to ensure accuracy but also to get information. Does any corrective action need taking as a result, what does it mean for the annual target, will another site have to reduce more to compensate for another site’s increase? You may also want to introduce sub-metering so that you can understand where impacts are occurring in more detail.
If you have many similar sites, you could also use league tables for different metrics to create a little competition. This can be extremely motivating as no one want to be at the bottom each month, but make sure the metrics you choose are fair – you might not want to compare offices with factories, or you might want to relate impacts to production quantity. And putting those league tables on the walls in offices and factories with performance trends for that site can also be very effective. Linking team performance to objectives and bonuses will of course reinforce this.
Operational improvements is an area where learning from others can really help. Share between factories, using different ones as pioneering site to establish new equipment or processes and then roll out to all. Use trade associations to share within your industry or use a cross-industry manufacturing platform to benefit from experience more widely.
CEN can help you in your planning and programme set up in this key area. Your own operations are likely to be where most of your people are based, so this is where they will see whether you are serious about sustainability. Getting them empowered in what they can impact locally can give them the confidence to challenge the processes and impacts from suppliers and customers which are usually trickier but require the same mindset.
About the Author
Chris is a senior strategic leader with over 25 years’ commercial experience including sales, marketing, strategic planning and major business change initiatives at AkzoNobel and ICI. He has a wide knowledge of sustainability and how to integrate this into business having held senior sustainability roles at AkzoNobel for 12 years, including as Global Sustainability Director Decorative Paints and AkzoNobel Planet Possible Programme Manager. Chris is now an independent sustainability consultant and a pension trustee director.
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