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A Candian firm has claimed that lean practices can make help your business more eco-friendly.

Ontario-based Cogent Power Inc, a transformer and steel component manufacturer, enlisted the help of some dedicated employees to help it reduce its carbon footprint and succeeded thanks to the use of some lean tools.

The firm made eco-friendly choices and eliminated landfill waste by using lean techniques kaizen and value stream mapping. Kaizen, which means ‘continuous improvement’ in Japanese, involves employees at every level of a company being involved in implanting lean forever.

With Kaizen, company leaders should allocate the resources and establish the strategy, systems and procedures to get lean to work. Then middle managers must ensure that these plans are being continually being implemented and check how they are performing.

Lower supervisors should then maintain the implementation, make and convey new suggestions to and from higher managers and employees and maintain the flow of communication. Shop-floor workers must also make suggestions on how to improve activities, learn how to work with these new jobs, and get involved in improvement activities.

Value stream mapping is a method of monitoring the flow of materials from the time the raw product arrives, through manufacturing process, and then leaving as finished products. By creating these maps of your business process you can flag up areas where you can cut away waste and change the way your firm operates for the better.

Cogent Power, with the support of its suppliers, replaced more than 300 metal halide light fixtures with new fluorescent models which reduced energy light use by 46%.

It also replaced electronically lit emergency signs with non-electric glowing signs and addressed other energy wasting problems by correcting air leaks in compressors, and replacing old inefficient equipment.

By refitting seals and bearings in their furnaces they found that heat loss was significantly cut and less costly gas was lost when they redesigned and rebuilt their door systems.

Working with suppliers and consumers Cogent Power also arranged for domestic customers to reuse wooden skids that the supplier would collect and refurbish – saving a huge cost.

By rethinking how its products were packaged the company also made a huge saving on cardboard.