Abstract
The current rapidly changing and highly competitive market has put companies under a great pressure towards adopting sustainable practices, in terms of keeping a healthy balance among economic, environmental and social performances. In this context, the lean-green manufacturing approach, which combines lean practices focused on customers’ demand, and green practices focused on reducing the business’ environmental impact, has gained popularity. Nevertheless, the lean-green manufacturing is still a relatively new practice, lacking a clear and structured research definition, and of significant evidence of successful cases in the practice. In this paper, a literature review is conducted to identify the actual possibility of combining lean and green practices, the current trends for implementing such combination and the potential sustainability improvements such implementation can lead. It is the authors’ intention that the findings analysed in this paper can contribute to the state-of-the-art of lean-green manufacturing and provide practitioners with a useful tool towards developing effective strategies for its deployment.
Highlights
For several years, manufacturing practices have been mainly focused on satisfying or creating needs, while keeping competitiveness in terms of product quality, time to market and innovation
It is important to highlight that, despite the great efforts found in the literature towards investigating the combined approach, only 45 articles have been found in the literature explicitly addressing this issue, demonstrating that too much research has still to be conducted in this direction [9,10,28]
The lack of further practical analyses is probably due to the fact that, since the idea of implementing lean and green practices together is relatively new, there are not many companies that have already adopted such a combined approach, making researchers to resort to simulations, theoretical analyses and pilot experiments to test their research hypotheses and proposals
Summary
For several years, manufacturing practices have been mainly focused on satisfying or creating needs, while keeping competitiveness in terms of product quality, time to market and innovation. These kind of manufacturing philosophies based on customers’ demand, together with the improved people living’s standards, have led to a growing product demand, fulfilled by a huge amount of produced goods, ending up in an increasing generation of pollution and wastes In this context, companies are urged to become more proactive regarding their environmental and social stance, moving towards more sustainable manufacturing practices, in terms of the well-known Triple-Bottom-Line (TBL) sustainability conceptualisation [1] (shown in Figure 1), which suggests that a company would be able to achieve sustainable results provided it is capable of improving environmental, social and economic performances simultaneously. Researchers have started to consider lean manufacturing with a renewed interest towards developing greener solutions capable of minimising wastes, and of reducing, by extending, modifying
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