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Cleaner production is the process of assessing resource usage (eg energy, water, raw materials) and generation of wastes in your business, identifying ways to reduce wastage, increase efficiency, reduce costs and deliver environmental benefits. If your business provides goods or services, which use resources and generate waste, then cleaner production may be a potential avenue for you to improve your bottom line.
A number of positive benefits result by identifying wastage in your business and implementing cleaner production plans through improved management of processes and materials, waste minimisation, optimisation of processes, and reduction of resource usage. Other business improvement processes such as 6 sigma, lean manufacturing, 5S’s can also achieve similar results. The common result of all these processes is the overall improvement to long term business sustainability through enhanced financial, environmental and social bottom lines.
Before embarking on a cleaner production project, management needs to ensure that they allow adequate support through available resources and a realistic time frame. The cleaner production method is a systematic method of assessing potential for cleaner production and involves a number of steps:
- Management commitment to the process is crucial from the beginning of the project;
- Collection and interpretation of data and information about processes has a number of phases, from preliminary assessments through to more detailed data collection. The aim is to enable process characterisation (greater understanding of process inputs and outputs) and prioritisation (identify the greatest opportunities for delivering outcomes);
- Identification of cleaner production improvement options;
- Evaluation of the options generated – this needs to include a technical, economic and environmental feasibility;
- Setting targets for process improvement to enable measurement of success;
- Implementation; and
- Ongoing measurement.
Cleaner production can be applied to any sized business and is ideally run with an internal cleaner production team consisting of a cross-section of staff from your major business areas supported by a team of senior managers. The process can be aided through the support of an external consultant such as Benbow Environmental to facilitate the assessments and to provide expert advice in specialist areas.
For more information please refer to our GHG and Cleaner Production Projects.
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