Auto manufacturing is not typically viewed as a very clean process. Putting aside the products themselves (no Hummer v. Prius fights today, please), making cars involves transforming heavy rolled steel, rubber, plastics and glass into an appliance that can move a family of five across the country in luxury and safety for years or decades to come. The auto factories I’ve visited, some in North America and some in Asia, were all huge complexes, modern and well-lit, but one can’t help but notice the environmental impact these plants can generate. From tremendous energy consumption to waste byproducts (everything from boxes to paint chemicals, auto factories can be environmental nightmares.
In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Professors Alan Robinson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Dean Schroeder (Valparaiso University, Valparaiso) published an article, “Greener and Cheaper,” examining how Subaru of Indiana Automotive, Inc. (a division of Japan’s Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd), operates a green auto manufacturing facility in Lafayette, Indiana. Subaru, of course, manufactures the Outback, Legacy and Tribeca models. Since 2000, the plant has achieved a 14% reduction in electricity consumption on a per-car basis. More remarkably, the plant has not shipped any waste to a landfill since May 2004! And this isn’t just some PR hack’s hyperventilating keyboard making these claims, folks. Professors Robinson and Schroeder are well-respected academics who document these claims, and more, in the article.
In a sidebox, the article describes 5 levels of commitment for categorizing companies based on their environmental strategies. They are:
LEVEL 1: Compliance
Management's focus is
on compliance with environmental rules and regulations. Green is considered a
cost.
LEVEL 2: Opportunistic and Ad Hoc
Some
environmental awareness. Management opportunistically takes advantage of low-cost,
money-saving green projects.
LEVEL 3: Analytical and Systematic
Environmental
impact is systematically measured, and the information used by management to
select improvement projects. The company is building its understanding of the
relationships between environmental impact, cost and risk in its business.
LEVEL 4: Integrated Into Daily Operations
Everyone
in the company is expected to be involved in improving the company's green
performance, and most ideas come from the bottom up. Green becomes an integral
part of what makes the company profitable.
LEVEL 5: Pioneering
The organization is developing approaches on the leading edge of current
environmental practice and thinking.
I think it’s a pretty effective way of describing and
cataloging management commitment to environmental initiatives, without being
too broad with platitudes while preserving some granularity in the
descriptions.
So how do you describe your company?