09 Sep Opportunity to Save Money for Your Business, Reduce Risks, and Protect the Environment
Whether you are looking for ways to save money for your business, reduce risks, tighten up operations or fulfill on your commitment to environmental stewardship, the Pollution Prevention (P2) and Lean Principles Workshop offers valuable tools and guidance for you.
Eliminating waste and running an efficient business is good for the bottom line and for the environment. Over the last two years companies have saved 1.1 million dollars by Reducing a million kWh of electicity, eliminating over 100,000 pounds of hazardous waste, reducing over 5,000 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions and conserving nearly three million gallons of water.
How? They got training to make processes efficient by reducing wasted motion in the process, excess activity, or use of too many materials. You will learn to use techniques like smaller batch size, just in time (JIT) delivery and single piece flow to reduce, energy, water use, hazardous and other pollutants.
This three-day workshop offers a valuable blend of worksheet assignments and group activities to facilitate learning from others' experiences and perspectives and have the opportunity to apply the P2 and Lean principles to their own businesses. Participants who complete the workshop will have heard from people who have successfully implemented P2 plans, and walk out with a draft Pollution Prevention plan, including a real-life project they can implement. A participant from Fort Hood shared, “The P2 Workshop really improved our P2 Plan, especially helping us better track our materials and wastes."
Participants take a step back from their businesses to analyze what's going in and out and learn to evaluate the non-product outputs from their businesses. Once those are identified it opens up creative problem solving to develop plans for what else can be done with those outputs. The next step is to prioritize the waste streams by evaluating them based on the volume of wastes, their risk factors, costs to the business, and greatest opportunity for return.
Another useful exercise is around value stream mapping. Do you know how much time, money and resources you actually spend to make your product or deliver your service? In the workshop you walk through a process that helps you identify what parts of the process are actually adding value.
Plans that don't get implemented are not helpful to anyone so one of the useful skills that participants get in this workshop is the ability to translate environmental goals into business language to make the business case to management and gain support for their P2 plans. The language developed revolves around three different areas 1) financial impacts 2) risk avoidance and 3) alignment with business strategies such as ISO, Six Sigma, Lean, and quality management systems.
A special feature of this workshop is the follow up afterward. The staff of the Zero Waste Network wants to support participants in reaching their goals and genuinely wants to know if their training is effective at saving businesses money and reducing waste. In follow up conversations with participants from just the last two workshops (which took place toward the end of 2012) we have identified more than $800,000 in savings from participants! One example comes from a paint manufacturer who discovered a way to turn a cost center into a modest profit center while dramatically cutting their waste disposal and without changing their handling very much. They estimated their annual savings at $350,000. A Houston drilling fluids company proclaimed “We drastically reduced hazardous waste all because of the workshop.”
So who attends? Well, anyone with a business or institution that uses energy and/or water. Meaning this can apply to nearly every business!
Past participants have included professionals from many sectors including:
- general manufacturing, electronics and equipment manufacturing
- chemical industry
- oil and gas
- universities and colleges
- warehousing
- military
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hospitals and health care systems, medical and pharmaceutical
laboratories - utilities
- EHS staff of all kinds of businesses
- Innovative and cutting edge companies looking to break into new markets or gain competitive edge.
- Metal finishers,
- Large auto repair centers.
The workshop is designed to build companies and organizations and institutions that want to be more competitive and effective while protecting the environment. If you want to build a company that will last, this workshop can help.
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