The Lean & Environment Toolkit
Purpose of This Toolkit
The Lean and Environment Toolkit offers practical techniques and strategies that can help lean, environmental, and other specialists at your shopfloor to deliver environmentally protective lean decisions as a routine task of your lean driven business operations. In fact, this toolkit draws heavily from the experience of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) partners and organizations who have pioneered integrated approaches to lean and environmental decision making while at the same time delivering world class performance, exerting market leadership, and achieving bottom line results. Also, the toolkit builds on work conducted and research sponsored by EPA’s Lean and Environment Initiative.
This toolkit is written for lean operational managers, environmental practitioners, and lean practitioners who work towards organizational efforts to identify and eliminate environmental wastes. As a result, the toolkit may help align your environmental management system’s goals and objectives as a routine task of your lean initiatives and business decisions.
The Toolkit will help you identify waste in terms of energy, water, and materials use. Identification of these environmental waste reduction opportunities is done through Kaizen events, 6S (5S + Safety), and Value Stream Mapping.
This toolkit is a living document. Future versions may include other lean practices. EPA welcomes your comments as well your ideas for other Lean and Environment strategies, tools, and resources. Please contact EPA with your thoughts or to discuss partnership opportunities using the Contact Us page.