Lean Sustainability

CHANGE FOR THE BETTER – What is good for our planet is good for business

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Germany Plans To Switch To 100% Alternative Energy By 2050

A new study issued by the Ger­man “Umwelt­bun­de­samt” comes to the con­clu­sion that Ger­many should be able to switch energy pro­duc­tion to 100% renew­able sources within 40 years. Inter­est­ingly the head of the agency, Jochen Flas­barth, states that this is doable with tech­nol­ogy that is avail­able today. Build­ing the nec­es­sary infra­struc­ture would need deci­sive action […]

Low Sustainability Ratings For Oil And Gas Corporations

An Oekom Study look­ing at 27 lead­ing oil and gas cor­po­ra­tions rates orga­ni­za­tions regard­ing their sus­tain­abil­ity. The study’s authors granted that cor­po­ra­tions try to do the right things, how­ever over­all their activ­i­ties are not focused enough and lack tan­gi­ble results. On a scale from A+ to D-, the small Aus­trian com­pany OMV ranked first with […]

Lean Means Sustainability — Step 4 — Improve

In ear­lier posts I wrote about “Define”, “Mea­sure” and “Ana­lyze” as part of Lean Six Sigma’s DMAIC cycle. The exam­ple I used in these pre­vi­ous posts showed that our office is not energy effi­cient, and we also ana­lyzed where and why. Remem­ber, the most impor­tant results of the Analy­sis phase are well deter­mined prob­lem causes. […]

You Can’t Control What You Can’t Measure

I am still con­cerned about what’s going on with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mex­ico. Pre­vi­ous esti­mates were that 800,000l oil spill into the sea every day. Some sci­en­tists come to the con­clu­sion that it is more likely to be 10 times more! It seems to be con­sen­sus that right now nobody knows […]

MP3 Beats CD">MP3 Beats CD

2009  Microsoft and Intel com­mis­sioned a study look­ing at envi­ron­men­tal ben­e­fits of dig­i­tal media com­pared to old school CD (or vinyl albums, do you still remem­ber?). Researcher at Stan­ford came to the con­clu­sion that there are energy– and CO2 sav­ings between 40% and 80% when music is dis­trib­uted dig­i­tally as com­pared to send­ing CDs. Another study […]