At the recent 2degrees summit, the Waste Management Open Group discussed the topic of how to get employees engaged in sustainable waste management initiatives. In this post I’ll discuss a few methods for embedding sustainable thinking into the DNA of a corporation.
Baseline – where are we starting from?
Before planning your route it is usually quite handy to know where you are starting from. One way to do this is to perform a waste audit. This can be a formal or informal review of waste policy and strategy within the organisation that indicates how embedded sustainable waste management is within the organisation. Following on from this you then need to get your sleeves rolled up and start reviewing activities within a company identifying the processes that generate waste and the types, quantity and/or weights. A number of websites provide audit tools. You can download a copy of our free audit tool. Ideally, the waste audit will encompass each area and location of the business. It should also extend to key suppliers but this may or may not be practical. Audits should happen on a continuous basis to ensure continuous improvement.
Executive Buy-in
If it is not supported at board level then it may be challenging to keep any initiatives alive. This support can be in the form of internal reduction targets based upon known baseline data or a public statement by the CEO outlining reduction goals. The company may participate in a voluntary disclosure scheme such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) or Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). This keeps the commitment and performance highly visible amongst stakeholders, industry groups and peers which helps to garner corporate focus. Selecting waste and recycling targets as key environmental aspects as part of a ISO 14001 environmental management system will also help ensure they are on the corporate scorecard.
Call in the evangelists
Every organisation will have employees who are really passionate about this stuff. Get them involved early. Make them “waste champions” or go-to people for advice, knowledge and support. You’ll find that, properly motivated, these people can make things happen.
What’s in it for me?
It’s important that employees feel a sense of ownership and involvement in reducing waste. My advice is for senior management to communicate the targets and inspect performance but otherwise to get out of the way and let employees and the evangelists do their thing. Positive feedback and incentives are obviously important. Choose wisely and try to link incentives to further improvements in sustainable waste performance e.g. use a percentage of savings in one area to fund other projects and another part for a celebration.
Make it visible
This is where the visual workplace comes into play once again. It should be easy for any employee to understand how their department and the company overall is performing against targets. This can be achieved via charts on notice boards, scorecards published in monthly or quarterly e-newsletter, blog posts etc. Make the metrics relative by expressing them in terms of £’s (or $’s) or by using benchmarks such as tonnes of waste per unit of production, hours of service, number of deliveries or whatever the relevant KPIs are for the business – refer to How to Choose KPI’s blog for ideas.
I’d be interested in your own stories of how you’ve engaged employees in the sustainable waste management journey within your business.
As our esteemed political leaders debate the relative merits of separate food waste collections we look at some of the eye popping facts and figures on what we waste and the business opportunity for enlightened recyclers and waste management companies.
The stats
An estimated 15 million tonnes (mt) of food waste is generated in the UK every year including 7.2 mt from households.
Wasting food costs the average family with children around £680 a year, or £50 a month.
Each year, one person gets through 90 drink cans (surely not me!), 70 food cans, 107 bottles and jars and 45kg of plastic.
The UK uses about 12 billion cans each year - enough to stretch to the moon and back.
Every day in the UK we throw away:
- 1.6 million whole untouched bananas
- 1.3 million unopened yoghurts
- 600,000 whole uncooked eggs
- 1.2 million untouched sausages
- 20 million slices of bread
The perfectly good food we throw away each year in the UK includes:
- Fresh vegetables and salad: £1.4 bn / 860,000 t.
- Fresh fruit: £990 m / 500,000 t.
- Bakery goods: £1.1 bn / 680,000 t.
- Home-made and pre-prepared meals: £2.1 bn / 660,000 t.
- Dairy and eggs. Includes milk thrown away from the fridge and leftovers from serving too much (e.g. breakfast cereals): £870 m / 530,000 t.
- £280m worth of milk is thrown away and over 90% of this is in amounts of 50g or more = about quarter of a glass each time.
- £480 m of wine.
- £250 m of carbonated soft drinks.
- £190 m of fruit juices and smoothies.....who’s for starting up a business called “Second chance smoothies!”?
A grand total of £7.38bn for this little lot but I’m sure it easily tops £10bn. Quite a figure when you consider that the total UK government resource budget for Transportation for 2012 is £6bn.
What’s the environmental impact? Extremely difficult to quantify the whole life cycle impact but if we were to stop wasting food that could have been eaten, the CO2 impact would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 5 cars off the road.
The Opportunity?
The main technologies for treating food waste are In-Vessel Composting (IVC) and Anaerobic Digestion (AD).
In addition to the 15 mt of food waste there is also an estimated 90 mt of animal slurry and manure that could be available for use by AD. In England alone this could generate between 3 – 5 TWh of electricity per year by 2020. This is enough to power over 0.5 million households.
There are currently 146 operational AD plants in the UK. The majority of these (~119) are small scale accepting less than 10,000 tonnes per annum.
According to AMR Research, in order to meet the 2013 and 2002 Landfill Directive (& the 2020 renewable energy) targets around 100 large commercial and 1,000 on-farm AD are likely to be needed plus an unspecified number of IVC plants.
AD plants are subject to Environmental Permitting Regulations based upon a number of factors including the input material type, storage/treatment capacity and net rated thermal input. The conditions of the permit outlines how plants must be managed including evidence of records and any requirements to monitor certain emissions. Reports must be submitted on a quarterly basis including details of waste accepted and removed from the site. Ideally, for larger installation the plant control or SCADA system would be linked to the site waste management software and electronic weighbridge if available.
So there you have it. A number of forward thinking recyclers and facilities management companies have already implemented food waste collection services. The successful ones will wield significant power as financing for AD projects will in a large part be based upon surety of supply.
As ever, I would be grateful for your comments and feedback.
For more information check out the following references:
http://www.biogas-info.co.uk/
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/waste/
http://www.greenboxday.co.uk/Information/Recycling_Waste_Did_You_Know.asp
http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/about_food_waste
Image counts and first impressions matter! Particularly in the world of recycling where customers now have a wide choice of partners and their corporate brand is at stake.
So here are my top tips for putting your best foot forward and showing off your capabilities and strengths as a professional recycling company. BTW – this blog is very much one of those “do as I say and not as I do” articles as our website is very much a work in progress...but hey-ho it’s my blog!
1. Show your wares
Use different media including website, print, email and social media to tell customers about your USPs. Make sure you display any:
- Certifications
- Memberships of professional associations
- Details of processes
- Information on material disposition
2. Your authority
Take a leaf out of inbound marketers and stamp your authority on your area of expertise by providing white papers, blogs and news articles that are relevant to your industry and that your customers will find informative and educational.
3. Case studies
The greatest communicators will tell you that the best way to get your point across is to tell stories! People like to hear stories because oftentimes they can directly relate stories to their own experience. Make sure that you have great case studies on your website that detail how you’ve solutioned problems for your customers.
4. Get them involved
Yes. Everybody is busy. However, people don’t like to be left out! As I mentioned in a previous blog post you should document your processes and extend the boundaries to include your customer’s relevant operations (e.g. dispatch of waste, compliance reporting). This does a number of things: it lets them know that you fully understand their requirements and pain points; it ensures that any changes are properly planned and communicated; and finally your customers feel valued and have a sense of ownership as a result of providing input into your process design.
5. Transparency
Process, data and disposition. Give them detailed reports that makes it easy for them to communicate to stakeholders including their own customers, the Environment Agency, the media etc. Your waste management software should provide:
- Track and trace reports – the who, what, where and when? You should be able to provide recycling reports that shows exactly what was received, what treatment was performed (including data destruction for HDDs or sterilisation for clinical waste) and where the resulting waste or fractions ended up. If you can’t do this you’ve got a problem!
- Duty of care – accurate waste transfer notes showing that collected waste was properly classified, quantified and transported by a licensed carrier to a licensed treatment or disposal site.
- Recycling Performance – show them how good they (and you) are doing with charts and reports showing overall recycling rates, performance by period, location, waste stream. Identify and communicate potential opportunities for improvement.
- CSR reporting – provide them with reports on CO2 saved as a result of using your service as well as any other CSR benefits
- Certificates of destruction – a signed undertaking that your customer’s waste has been recycled or disposed of properly. For IT disposal companies this should also include copies of data wipe certificates
6. Make it easy for them!
Your customers should ideally be able to access all of the above information via an easy-to-use and informative customer portal that matches the style and branding of your existing website. Give them:
- An informative dashboard with interactive charts and reports
- The ability to create online orders
- The ability to download their compliance information in the relevant format
So that’s my 6 top tips for recycling companies to delight their customers. As usual I welcome your feedback and suggestions...haven’t had any yet. Perhaps you could be the first?
Here’s my input on some of the key things to consider when you are designing or re-designing your recycling processes:
1. Get the right people involved
Identify the people who perform each step of the process and ensure that they are involved. In a recycling operation this will include sales and/or account management, scheduling, compliance management and reporting, logistics/collection, goods-in, recycling operations (i.e. processing the goods or waste), dispatch/shipping and finance.
2. Walk through each process
If you have existing processes our advice to you is to walk through those processes since some operations do not always follow documented steps and processes have a habit of “creeping” or “morphing” over time.
3. Document your recycling process
Start off by mapping out the major steps in sequence. Detailed steps can be added later and indeed some task may require their own specific process map. Use Microsoft Visio or Smart Draw or equivalent so that the process diagrams can be maintained and updated. This can be useful for a variety of different reasons including training new staff, explaining your processes to ISO auditors or including in a tender response.
4. Fill in the details
List out every single step in detail including any decisions, outputs (reports, certificates of destruction etc), wait times, physical moves, storage areas and update your process document accordingly. Top tip: Don’t try to include everything in a single diagram. Some of your sub-processes or tasks will be pretty complex (e.g. hard drive removal and data erasure) so simply create a new process diagram and reference that in your main recycling process flow.
5. Review and brainstorm
Once this is complete, print out some copies of the flows on large sheets of paper (A3 or equivalent). Pin them to the wall and gather your team for a brainstorming session. Step through each process and look for risks and potential for improvement. Ask the following questions:
- Are there any opportunities for security/hazard exposures (e.g. non-sterilised clinical waste escaping from process, data bearing assets escaping from an IT recycling process)?
- Can steps be removed or rearranged to improve the efficiency of the process?
- Is the appropriate recycling data being captured at each point in order to automatically generate reports and invoices from your recycling software?
6. Implement physical controls and visual aids
Picked these tips up from Andy Howell at Stone Computers! – thanks Andy!
When building a process for sensitive waste streams it is recommended that you use physical controls such as secure access to certain areas and/or a one-way systems. This way you can limit the physical points where sensitive material (e.g. hard disks that have not been erased/destroyed, hazardous chemicals prior to treatment etc.) can potentially escape. Adopt good visual management within your warehouse. Colour code hazardous or potentially hazardous material so that you can clearly identify it.
7. Extend the boundaries and involve your customers
You might be able to control your own processes but it is unlikely that you can control your customer’s. For this reason you may benefit from getting your customers involved in the elements of your process that take place at their premises (e.g. collection of waste material). Top tip: ensure that you include a “handshake” step where a customer reviews a list of what you are collecting and signs it off. You should consider implementing good recycling software that gives you the ability to perform an onsite inventory and capture an electronic signature.
8. Try it out
Build your process or rearrange an existing process and try it out. If you identify issues are areas for improvement then make changes and update the documentation.
9. Perform continuous improvement
Make it a habit to continuously reviewing your processes and looking for opportunities for improvement. Small steps to greatness!
10. Practice full disclosure
If you have a top notch waste tracking software (not unlike We3 Recycler J) then you can provide your customers and auditors with full details of their waste materials as they pass through your recycling operations. This will provide you with major brownie points....your customers will have faith in your operations and professionalism and word will spread. Contrast this with a poor undocumented operation that does not or cannot disclose detailed information.
By no means an exhaustive list. For those of you who are handling data-bearing assets (PCs, laptops, servers, mobile phones, ipads etc) I recommend that you visit the ADISA (Asset Disposal Information Security Alliance) site and download a free copy of their IT Asset Disposal Standard.
As always I would welcome your thoughts and comments.
After a number of the big recyclers recently pledging allegiance to cashle
ss payments at their metal recycling yards, we ask what would be the potential implications for smaller recyclers of changes to the existing legislation?
SITA recently became the latest large waste management company to make a commitment to “cashless payments” for metals at all of its yards. The company announced that it will launch a new electronic payment method at its metals recycling site in Hayes. The scheme, which is the first of its kind in the UK, will be rolled out across SITA UK’s 10 metals recycling sites.
It is estimated that metal theft costs the UK economy more than £1bn annually. Around 30% of the country’s £5B in scrap metal sales are currently cash transactions which makes it extremely difficult to track down metal thieves.
SITA’s Chief Executive, David Palmer-Jones and others have called for electronic payments to be mandatory to compliment the other proposed changes to the 1964 Scrap Metal Dealers Act. The proposed changes were introduced by Labour MP Graham Jones in his Scrap Metal Theft Bill in November of last year. As well as implementing cashless payments the bill would require sellers to produce a suitable photo ID for every transaction as well as giving police powers to search any scrap yard and close any yard where stolen material is found. It would also levy a dealers’ licence fee to fund regulation.
The Government has also recently announced that it will spend £5 million on a special task force to tackle the problem of metals theft.
So how will these proposed changes affect existing scrap yards and metals recyclers?
The US has been dealing with a huge metal theft issue for a number of years now and consequently most states have implemented some form of legislation to combat the problem. Measure include requirements for scrap metal dealers and recyclers to keep and report detailed records of transactions as well as cashless payment systems and in many cases a “tag-and-hold” policy that prohibit dealers from reselling metals within a certain time period (usually as instructed by police). Some states have also introduced criminal penalties for scrap dealers that are found to be knowingly reselling stolen scrap.
Around 45 states now have some form of legislation in place. For example, in Texas registered scrap dealers must report transactions to the Texas Department of Public Safety within 7 days of receipt. The report requirements include the date of the transaction, type of metal, metal form, weight, seller name, business name, business address, photo ID number, vehicle registration and vehicle make and model.
In Arizona the requirements are even more stringent. Scrap yards have to electronically report all non-account transactions within 24 hours to the Rocky Mountain Information Network. Details required include sellers name, address and personal details including sex, weight, height, hair colour, eye colour, race and DOB. The scrap yard also has to capture and submit a photocopy of the seller’s drivers licence or passport. They have to fingerprint and take a photograph of the seller. Finally, they are also required to include the details of the transaction including type of metal, form, weight, price and a photograph of the material!!!
California operates a cashless payment system (for all transactions over $20) and payment cannot be made until at least 3 days after receipt of material.
Many states including Louisiana, Michigan, New Mexico and Washington have “tag-and-hold” policies where material must be labelled and held for a specified number of days before it can be shipped or re-sold. Typically, this varies from two to seven days but in some states police can mandate that certain material is held for up to 90 days.
In addition to state legislation, at a federal level the U.S. Department of Justice, has enacted new reporting requirements for automobile recyclers, dismantlers and shredders in all 50 states requiring them to electronically report the intake and disposition of salvaged vehicles to the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System (NMVTIS) starting Jan. 1, 2010.
For more information on US scrap metals legislation refer to http://www.recyclingtoday.com/scrap_theft_legislation.aspx
If the current situation in the US is an indication of where metals recycling legislation is headed in the UK then I think it is fair to say that this could present significant challenges for the industry and in particular for small independent yards. The data capture requirements alone would represent a significant investment in technology not counting the ongoing administrative costs of compiling the reports. Is there a political will to implement these kind of measures in the current economic climate? I’m not sure. Recent news reports indicate that the bill is understood to be facing resistance from officials at the Department of Business as it runs contrary to the Government’s policy of reducing red tape. However, the problem of metal theft certainly is certainly not going to disappear and it is unlikely that the industry will be allowed to continue to self-regulate.
As always, I’d be interested to hear your views.
Howdy wasters! Most professional organisations these days use a number of different metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to keep track on the overall business performance across different functions or divisions. These are often consolidated on a scorecard that is reviewed by senior management on a monthly or quarterly basis.
In many organisations these KPIs cover the following areas:
- Financial
- Operations
- Customer Satisfaction
- Quality
- Environmental
So what is the purpose of KPIs? Well, in theory they should provide a quantitative and/or qualitative measure of whether the business is making progress or not. However, according to top performance consultant, David Parmenter, KPIs that are measured monthly or quarterly do not create change within an organisation. To illustrate a real KPI in action, David relates the story of Lord King, chairman of British Airways (BA) in the 1980s who appointed consultants to recommend key measures that he should focus on to effect the turnaround of the ailing airline. The consultants came back with a single critical success factor: the timely departure and arrival of its aeroplanes. Lord King was apparently not impressed as everybody in the airline business knew the importance of timely flights. The consultants explained that this metric was in fact key to the business and had a knock on effect to a variety of other critical measures including:
- Increased costs in many ways including airport surcharges and accommodation for passengers affected by flight delays and missing connections.
- Poor customer satisfaction due to late departures resulting in fewer repeat customers
- Creating a negative image of the business affecting future pool of potential employees
- Knock on effect on staff morale having to deal with unhappy customers
- Increased wastage of fuel as planes tried to recover lost time instead of cruising at most economical flight speed
So Lord King adopted this KPI and whenever a flight was delayed by a specific length of time he would receive a phone call and would in turn call the responsible BA airport manager. This resulted in a dramatic decrease in flight delays and turnaround impact on BA in general as nobody wanted to receive an angry call from the chairman.
David goes on to explain key characteristics of KPIs as follows:
- That they are measured frequently e.g. daily or 24/7 (KPIs are not measured monthly as the horse has already bolted by this point)
- They are non-financial measures (i.e. not measured in £’s or $’s)
- That they are acted upon by the CEO or MD on a daily basis
- All staff understand the measure and whatever corrective action is required to fix/improve
- Responsibility for the KPI can be tied down to an individual or team
- The KPI has a significant impact on the organisation e.g. it impacts on other critical success factors
- Positive movement of the KPI affects all other performance measures in a positive way
So what KPIs should you choose for your recycling business to make the maximum impact? I think this really depends upon a number of factors including your key business goals, what stage of growth the business is at, how you are performing in relation to your competition and the needs and wants of the various stakeholders within the business. For example, if you are a software company and your vision is to be the number one provider of quality, Software-as-a-Service solutions for the recycling industry (what a lofty and noble goal!) then a critical success factor for your business might be percentage of market share. However, this is not a KPI as you can’t measure it daily. A good proxy might be the number of new customers on a daily basis. However, you do a bit more research and you realise that the number of new customers is directly proportional to the number of leads you have in your sales funnel which is proportional to the number and quality of marketing activities. So a KPI for this business could be the number of daily marketing campaigns.
When I first started contemplating KPIs for a recycling business I came up with the usual suspect of sales revenue, net profit, EBITDA, revenue and cost per tonne waste received, revenue per customer order etc. but as you will note from David’s advice, all of these are typically historical measures and are very much reactive. I also considered some of the key environmental measures that our We3 Recycler and carboncheck products track including percentage (%) reuse, recycling and landfill rates, energy used and CO2 emissions per tonne of waste processed and while these are clearly critical success factors for any recycling business they are once again past-looking measures. After much thought I arrived at a handful of KPIs that I would say are core to any recycling business:
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KPI
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Reason for selection
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No. of marketing campaigns
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If you are not reaching out and engaging with potential clients then the chances are that your business is either not growing or is not growing as quickly as your competitors. This applies to both inbound and outbound sales channels. There is also an element of reach and innovation that needs to be considered as part of this KPI
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Initiatives for improved reuse and recycling rates
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This directly impacts reuse, recycling and landfill/disposal rates and is a key differentiator for your business. If you can demonstrate to your customers and potential customers that your processes have better recovery rates and are more environmentally friendly than your competitors then this will have a ripple-through effect on your entire business
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Environmental/Security escapes
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Can ruin your business. Robust processes and internal quality testing should be in place to reduce or eliminate exposures.
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Timely and accurate reporting
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Customers and regulators are happy when they receive accurate reports on time. Continued tardiness of reporting leads to suspicions on whether companies are in control and can prompt unplanned audits or loss of business to competitors.
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Tonnes or quantity processed per hour
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You cannot sell what you don’t have (unless you are a broker of course and then you can sell anything J). You need to ensure that productivity matches you revenue targets and customer commitments
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By no means and exhaustive list. I’d be really interested in hearing from you recyclers out there on the specific KPIs that you employ in your business and the reasons why.
For more information on KPIs visit out www.davidparmenter.com or check out David’s book – Key Performance Indicators which is available from Amazon and other sources.
Do Lean management principles have a place is the world of waste and recycling? The concept of Lean management has grown out of Lean Manufacturing, the Toyota Production System, Just-in-time (JIT) and Kaizen and is a way of applying waste saving principles to other areas of business beyond traditional manufacturing. Many of the principles were developed and championed by Taiichi Ohno who led a turnaround at Toyota between 1960 and 1966. Ohno colourfully referred to kaizen and JIT as “the last fart of a ferret.” (apparently ferret are prolific farters when cornered – who wouldn’t be?).
It almost seems counter-intuitive to apply waste saving techniques to waste but we are of course referring to waste associated with the process such as excessive time spent double handling material, poor processing yields, waste of energy and so on. For the purpose of this discussion and to avoid confusion (you’ll be confused enough by the end of this blog J) let’s refer to these as inefficiencies.
One of the fundamentals of Lean is that by improving efficiency you reduce costs and increase capacity thereby improving profits. Oh if the recycling business was only so easy! This of course pre-supposes that you have a steady supply of inbound waste.
Some of the tools used in Lean include:
- Flowcharting
- Building cells
- The 5Ss
- Pull Systems
- Kanban Design
- Value-add/non-value-added analysis
- Setup reduction
- Brainstorming
Let’s discuss some of these techniques in a bit more detail.
Flowcharting
Right. Hands up. How many of you have flowcharted your business processes? OK. Not bad. A few hands there. Flowcharts can be very powerful for a variety of reasons. First of all they help standardise a process and also provide an easy to follow visual representation of the steps in a process. For external stakeholders such as customers and the environment agency they provide a level confidence that the recycler is a professional outfit. There are three basic steps to flowcharting – gathering information about the process steps; categorizing and sequencing the steps and mapping out the process in a diagram. This can be performed using a pen and paper and then transferred to Microsoft Word or Visio if you have it. Check out our We3 AMS module (http://www.greenoaksolutions.com/products/recycler.aspx#details) provides workflow design and visual charting for mapping and building repeatable processes.
A useful tip is to extend your flowcharts beyond your physical recycling processes to include sales order management and production of waste transfer notes, invoices and reports. You may be surprised how (unnecessarily) complex these operations can be. Also, if you do have mapped processes, when was the last time that you checked whether your documented processes mirror what is actually happening in your recycling operations?
Building Cells
In the Lean culture another technique for removing inefficiencies is building cells. Many traditional recycling processes are serial lines with specific stations that in some cases are far apart and people have to move material considerable distances from one process to the next. The philosophy behind cells is that you move the process to the people and not the other way around. This obviously yields the greatest benefit in manual intensive processes. As a quick guide to building cells you should:
- Calculate the process time for the existing process
- Determine bottlenecks or pacing operations (which steps take the longest)
- Brainstorm to come up with a new arrangement
- Move some stations and machines
- Man it, run it and time it, move it again if necessary
- Document new process when you are happy
Generally, it is best to arrange equipment and materials in a U-shaped pattern leaving as little room between machines or stations as possible, safety permitting.
5S
5S is a Lean management method used to standardise processes and make problems and opportunities for improvement highly visible. The 5S’s were originally devised in Japan and are translated as follows:
- Seiri - Sort and eliminate
- Seiton - Order
- Seiso - Clean
- Seiketsu - Maintain
- Shitsuke - Discipline
So when applied to the workplace the 5S’s can be further explained as follows:
Seiri (Sort) – sort and remove anything that is not used or needed. It is amazing how much clutter accumulates in factories for no other reason than “that’s always been there”.
Seiton (Order) – establish a repeatable process and mark out locations for waste including inbound waste/product, WIP staging areas, processed waste/finished goods; tools including hand tools, pump-barrows, shredders, balers, weigh-scales, IT equipment and any other processing equipment. Use paint or tape to mark out locations for these things.
Seiso (Clean) – clean the workplace and implement a regime of regular cleaning. I know this may seem futile in a waste processing facilities but the whole point is to establish some order and visual management so that anybody looking at the processing facility can assess the state of the process in 10 seconds or less.
Seiketsu (Maintain) – this primarily means to implement a “5S standard” and maintain it. However, I also believe it extends to getting workers to implement and adhere to regular equipment maintenance and preventative maintenance.
Shitsuke (Discipline) – Implementing and maintaining 5S principles requires discipline.
Pull Systems
This is an interesting one when applied to waste and will hopefully spark a bit of debate. Pull systems applied to manufacturing has three primary objectives: provide a signal for action; synchronize flow through the process; limit inventories. This makes perfect sense particularly in a build-to-order scenario. The customer orders the product which creates a signal in the form of a work order. The product is built using a repeatable process that pulls parts from small inventory buffers that have reorder signals. The product is built to order so there is no build up of finished goods inventory. So material costs are optimised and so labour costs as the product is only built when an order is placed. Sounds good in theory but not sure it really works in practice where you have the carrying costs of the labour (unless you have extremely flexible staffing arrangements) and supply chains are not always 100% reliable. What about the world of recycling? Is there anything that can be applied here to optimise costs? Let’s look at the example of a computer recycling operation. Typically, you receive an order to collect a mixed load of equipment and process it based upon the customer’s processing requirements and the estimated market value of the equipment. You process it to conclusion and send the customer copies of the asset report and waste transfer notes. In this case the signal is the inbound order which “pushes” the equipment through the process even although in many cases this will be a free collection and you do not yet have a buyer for the processed equipment. You expend time and effort on equipment that in many cases is of low value and may takes months to sell. Possibly the solution is a half-way house. “Push” the equipment through to the point where it has been validated and made data-safe (or alternatively it is stored in a secure area). The customer asset reports can then be sent out. Once a buyer places an order for equipment then it can be processed through the remainder of the steps.
Setup Reduction
These can offer the simplest short term reduction to inefficiencies and can be applied throughout the business. Typically, projects can target a 90% reduction over standard operating procedure. Many of the previous techniques can and should be applied to help reduce setup time. For example, standardising locations for material and information, ensuring that required tools are in their place so you don’t need to search for them. The basics of setup reduction revolve around the following areas:
Workplace organisation
Ensuring that areas are organised and uncluttered. “A place for everything and everything in its place”.
Establishing point-of-use storage for tooling and material close to the work station.
Staging inbound waste near the point of processing and outbound materials in an outbound container near the point of shipment.
Methods
Document repeatable setup procedures detailing what needs to happen and in what sequence and what tools are required. This should ideally be supported by a blown-up photograph of the ideal work area
Implement preventative maintenance check and procedures for equipment and tools.
Prioritise support services to ensure rapid response to issues
Mistake-proof (referred to as “poka-yoke”....sounds like a combination of egg and ice cream. Yum!) processes wherever possible. A good example of this in the recycling industry could incldue implementing a highly visual signal that indicates that hazardous or sensitive wastes have not yet been made safe e.g. a large red sticker on a hard-drive that has not been data-erased or enclosing and separating the inbound side of to a rotoclave from the outbound side for clinical waste so that treated and non-treated are physically separate.
Information
Wherever possible automate the collection of data to eliminate the need for paper-based record-keeping which invariably leads to inefficiencies in hunting for information to produce reports and invoices.
Make work instructions and procedures easily accessible to employees at point of use.
Integrated IT systems such as We3 Recycler can eliminate the need for paper-tracking, multiple spreadsheets and separate work instructions.
These are just a few of the techniques used in Lean management. I think they definitely have their place in the world of recycling and are particularly relevant in this economic climate where businesses really need to optimise costs. Lean also dove-tails very well with ISO 14001 and other environmental management standards and provides a practical platform for improvement projects which can be monitored and measured.
For more information on Lean Management I would recommend the following books:
Lean Thinking by Womack and Jones
The Kaizen Blitz by Laraia, Moody and Hall