The relationship between lean and green isn’t new. Experts have written about it for over a decade. It is a topic that has not received a lot of mainstream coverage, although we do talk about it in Pallet Enterprise. Here, we provide a closer look.
Lean, at its essence, has to do with eliminating waste in production. Generating less scrap generally improves a company’s sustainability metrics, which has been the basis of the connection between lean and sustainability. What has changed, however, is the utilization of lean-related concepts such as continuous improvement and lean communications to help boost sustainability efforts.
Communication is essential to a lean transformation. People need to understand the expectations and how they are performing. Communication boards that display company aspirations such as mission and vision, critical metrics, schedules, and top-down and bottom-up information can help enhance the flow of information between production personnel and upper management.
The other important aspect here is continuous improvement – the idea of bottom-up involvement that helps unearth improvement ideas and generate employee engagement. To quote from Michigan Tech, “Lean is also about building a culture, one that respects all employees and enables them to pursue opportunities to improve their work and share ideas for continuous improvement. It is a systematic, intentional model for creating and sustaining an environment where continuous improvement is the norm.”
As it turns out, these approaches are also particularly useful in internal corporate sustainability efforts and, hence, have become part of an enhanced intersection between lean and sustainability.
Julia Goldstein, PhD, is the author of Beyond the Green Team: Aligning Internal and External Communication to Advance Corporate Sustainability (published 2022). She also appeared on a recent Gemba Academy podcast (Episode GA 455) to talk about the lean intersection, and predominantly about how to best manage communications to further sustainability aspirations.
Goldstein’s book is a simply written, straight-forward guide. It covers internal and external communications, collaborative efforts with other companies, and putting it all together.
One of her insights is that sometimes a company is doing a lot to support sustainability, but the company has not done a good job of communicating that to the rank and file employees. This, she believes, is more common than managers may think. The wood pallet Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is not mentioned in the book, but it comes to mind as a wonderful story and example of how real-world data can be used to tell a better story. Folks in wood pallet manufacturing are proud of the EPD research. But many workers in the plant don’t know a thing about it. Beyond just sharing the message with customers, companies must do a better job of educating workers on how their activities positively impact the supply chain and the environment.
Better internal environmental messaging can build engagement with employees and help improve retention. People like to work at a job that makes a difference in the broader world.
Goldstein provides a tidy discussion of how to build a sustainability team that seemed evocative of how we used to build reusable pallet and container program teams many years ago in the grocery industry. She advocates for diverse, cross-functional membership as well as top management sponsorship to ensure that more than just switching to reusable coffee mugs and recycling office paper is accomplished—low-impact successes that can quickly deflate initiative in the absence of larger wins. More substantive victories are needed to drive momentum and engagement. The most useful advice was in identifying six common bottlenecks to progress and offering workarounds.
The chapter on external communications contained useful information as well as cautionary tales. Some companies these days are launching and trumpeting the benefits of more sustainable products without reminding the public that the new product amounts to only 5 or 10% (sometimes far less than that) of their overall volume. It can be greenwashing by omission and the short-sighted pursuit of profit that ultimately backfires, infuriating informed customers and employees alike. Rather than proclaiming that a company has arrived at the promised land of sustainability, it would be far more effective, in the long run, to be transparent about where the company is on its sustainability journey and outline the plan for improvement.
Goldstein also provides examples of bad crisis management, such as the case of Scotts Miracle-Gro. It was attacked by advocacy groups regarding toxic algal buildups in lakes and chose to deflect blame rather than find a solution, which it eventually did with a phosphate-free product, but only after considerable brand damage. When companies are open and honest rather than deflecting, they can build trust and opportunities for collaboration.
We had a similar situation in the pallet industry when funky-smelling Tylenol products were associated with wood pallets in 2010, eliciting fearful headlines such as “Can Shipping Pallets Contaminate Your Food?” There were a lot of those headlines in the mainstream press as reporters were finding out that some pallets might be unsafe and that hundreds of millions of them are transporting food.
“Even though there was no record of pallets being involved in food safety incidents, ‘evidence’ of contamination, along with a shocking realization that the supply chain is full of pallets, was enough to generate a lot of media coverage,” I wrote back in 2012. “To tell people they are mistaken about their concerns is just going to raise the outrage level and make the problem worse. The first order of business is to lower the outrage, unless as a competing product, your goal is to crank the outrage up, which is exactly what happened in the pallet food safety skirmishes.”
By 2012, the National Wooden Pallet Container & Association (NWPCA)
had changed tact and was working collaboratively with the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to establish safe handling practices. The situation was diffused, and it was an approach still paying dividends to the pallet industry in 2023.
“Openness and transparency can be scary,” Goldstein wrote. “Companies where employees at all leadership levels embrace it are in a better position to respond when they are called out for a practice that doesn’t match their stated goals. Instead of going on the defensive they can ask questions and collaborate on solutions.”
One of the other things I like about Goldstein’s book is her “Five Stages of Sustainable Communications” framework, which can help a company identify its sustainability communications maturity level and give it a sense of how to improve. The stages start with “unaware” and move through “vaguely aware,” “aware,” “involved” and “fully engaged.”
While there is no mention of the pallet industry in the book, it offers applicable insights for people tasked with leading green aspirations. I saw several more pallet parallels than I had space to mention. And for those companies already on a lean journey, it serves as a reminder that those lean practices can prove useful for accelerating their sustainability initiatives as well.
