Cutting waste with employee involvement teams - total quality waste minimization

Business Horizons, Sept-Oct, 1995 by Douglas R. May, Brenda L. Flannery

How concerned is business about the waste it produces? Most seem to think that producing waste is an inevitable, but non-value adding, part of doing business. Traditionally, much discussion has centered on the importance of improving industry's intended outputs (products and services), while little dialogue has focused on minimizing or finding new uses for the undesirable waste byproducts of industry. This lack of attention may be due to the fact that reducing or eliminating solid, liquid, or gaseous waste streams requires a significant change in the way we think about and conduct business. The re-emerging environmental movement of the 1990s has many managers rethinking the impact their activities have on the environment.

Recycling is one environmental solution that has been embraced by most of those concerned with the waste issue. For example, many corporate break rooms, municipal office buildings, and universities have recycling bins strategically placed to collect discarded soda cans and waste paper. Still, although aluminum and paper recycling is a positive starting point, it will not begin to solve our waste management problem. In fact, recycling often contributes to the waste problem because additional energy, raw materials, and pollutants are necessary to convert the trash into a usable, recycled product. Some believe that the "recycling mentality" is only a band-aid for our environmental waste problems and that it prohibits us from really thinking or behaving much differently than we have in the past. The purpose of this article is to examine how organizations can use employee involvement teams to develop and implement solutions that lead to overall reductions in the amount or toxicity of waste generated.

WASTE MINIMIZATION AND ORGANIZATIONAL SUSTAINABILITY

Waste minimization is an efficient and up-front solution to waste management that can significantly alter the way business thinks about and treats waste. Minimizing waste is a superior alternative to recycling because it seeks to reduce--and possibly even eliminate--environmental waste problems by reducing the quantity or toxicity of manufacturing wastes as well as the wastes created by products at the end of their useful life. It encompasses activities that range from good housekeeping practices to product redesign in order to reduce the amount of waste generated, stored, treated, or disposed of by a facility.

Waste minimization is not only an environmentally superior alternative, it is also a competitively sound strategy for companies. Such a change in thinking about waste can become a real competitive advantage for firms by allowing them to (1) get out from underneath stringent governmental regulations, (2) reduce escalating disposal costs, (3) position themselves as an environmentally sound company, and (4) become more profitable in the long run. These are all compelling reasons for companies--both large and small--to focus on waste minimization as a "new and improved" way of doing business.

Corporate waste minimization efforts are actually an element of a larger, national pollution prevention initiative. In 1990, Congress passed the Pollution Prevention Act declaring that U.S. environmental policy would be as follows:

  [P]ollution should be prevented or
  reduced at the source whenever feasible;

Material or product substitution. Material or product substitution involves replacing a toxic or hazardous product with a less toxic or hazardous one. For example, a 3M pharmaceutical plant in Northridge, California replaced a solvent-based coating for medicine tablets with a water-based coating. Water-based paints, solvents, and cleaners produce much less hazardous fumes than solvent-based equivalents. The spraying system alterations at the Northridge plant cost $60,000; however, annual solvent purchases of $15,000 and the need for $180,000 in emission control equipment were eliminated. Most important, 24 tons of air pollution are no longer spewed annually into the California atmosphere.

Du Pont's CEO Edgar Woolard affirms that modifying the mix of raw materials--even though it may mean using more expensive ones--can cut waste in half and save money. Woolard believes that "the old way of manufacturing had been the most economical way 10 years ago, but with the cost of landfills today it is now more economical to use higher cost components which produce less waste" (Jones 1990).

A material change does not necessarily imply higher costs, though. At a number of its manufacturing facilities, AT&T replaced solvent-based cleaners containing chlorofiuorocarbons (CFCs) with water-based cleaner--often just soap and water--and dropped its chlorinated solvent emissions from more than 3 million pounds to less than 1,000 in just three years.

Finding more environmentally sound alternatives to products and materials requires breaking out of the "usual" way of doing and thinking about things. To encourage this change in thinking and performance from company personnel, Du Pont partly bases its executive compensation and bonus system for middle managers and senior officers on their individual environmental stewardship activities. For example, a bonus could be more than 10 percent if the employee developed, say, a non-polluting product or an environmentally benign agricultural pesticide. Thus, motivating and stretching employees to embrace an attitude of corporate environmentalism can result in positive changes for both the company and the environment.