Sustainable Manufacturing: Strategic Issues in Green Manufacturing

Earth’s resources are limited. With the explosion in world population and the increasing rate of consumption, it will be increasingly difficult to sustain the quality of life on earth if serious efforts are not made now to conserve and effectively use the earth’s limited resources. It is projected that the current world population of 5.6 billion people would rise to 8.3 billion people by the year 2025 (Furukawa, 1996). This is an increase of 48.21% from the current level. Yet, earth’s resources such as fossil fuel, landfills, quality air, and water are increasingly being depleted or polluted. So, why there is a growth in population and there is a decline in the necessary resources to sustain the increasing population? Since the mid-1980s, we have witnessed a rapid proliferation of new products with shorter life cycles. This has created tremendous wastes that have become problematic as more and more of the landfills are usurped. Increasingly, more and more environmental activist groups are forming and, with consumer supports, are putting pressures on corporations to improve their environmental performance. These efforts are also being supported by the increase in the number of new legislatures to protect the natural environment. Thus, responsible manufacturing is needed to achieve sustainable economic development. Strikingly, studies have linked economic growth to environmental pollution (Madu, 1999a, 1999b). Thus, there is a vicious cycle between improved economic development and environmental pollution. This traditional belief on a link between environment pollution and economic growth often is a hindrance to efforts to achieve sustainable development. Sustainable manufacturing is therefore a responsible manufacturing strategy that is cognizant of the need to protect the environment from environmental pollution and degradation by conserving the earth’s limited resources and effectively planning for the optimal use of resources and safe disposal of wastes. In the past, manufacturers have been lukewarm about any strategy to develop sustainable manufacturing. They viewed such strategies as expensive and therefore not economically viable. However, this mood is gradually changing as more and more big companies are developing environmentally conscious manufacturing strategies through their entire supply chain. Many have also seen that environmentally conscious manufacturing can become an effective competitive strategy. Thus, sustainable manufacturing can lead to an improved bottom line and therefore makes wise business sense. We shall in this chapter trace the origins of sustainable development, which gave rise to sustainable manufacturing. Further, we shall identify different strategies to sustainable manufacturing and then present cases of successful implementation of sustainable manufacturing by multinational corporations such as Kodak and Xerox.