It's All in the Jeans
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by Richard Maltzman,
Dave Shirley
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Dave Shirley
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Date
In our book, Green Project Management, we included an entire chapter on life-cycle assessment (LCA). As a matter of fact, we went even further to work with Dr. Mary Ann Curran, the director of the US EPA’s LCA research program at the National Risk Management Research Laboratory in Cincinnati, Ohio. And, Dr. Curran wrote the foreword to our book. That’s how important we believe the connection between LCA and sustainability.
Recently we read an interesting article about the efforts of Levi Strauss & Company to take that next step and develop their own LCA tools, to better measure their unique inputs, outputs and to better understand and track the impacts of products from the design stage to end-of-life. “Levi’s is working to take LCA out of the sustainability silo and into the design room. The company's clothing designers are using its Evaluate tool on a daily basis to make decisions about things like fabric choices, washes and dyes.”
They are using their tool “Evaluate to reach down to the material level to assess the impacts of various components” to be able to make informed decisions. Levi designers are evaluating fabric sustainability early in the process to be able to make choices prior to the design process. According to Paul Dillinger, senior director of global design for Levi's Dockers brand, “Now we have 16 core fabrics we'll put through the tool to further hone the assortment -- so all that information will be available to us prior to the design process. Rather than audit our choices later, this gives us a chance to start off with the right fabrics." As we have always said, like quality, greenality needs to be planned in, not inspected in.
Levi’s is not unique, other companies like Canon, Kraft and Mazda are also doing work in the LCA arena prior to product design. In our book, we used Proctor and Gamble as an example of a company using LCA tools to view their products holistically. Nike is another company who is using, and has been using for a while, LCA in the apparel industry. When you look at Kraft – food industry, Levis and Nike – apparel industry, and P&G in the consumer goods industry, the use of these tools is wide-spread and pervasive, a good thing.
Chapter 10 of our book is about waste reduction and our 4-Ls, Lean, Learn, Linked and Lasting. The aforementioned companies make the same connections we do, between LCA and the 4-Ls. They are approaching sustainability in a holistic way, considering their entire footprint. One example of this approach is Levi’s use of “Waterless Jeans” process. According to the company it has saved 172 million gallons of water since introducing the process in 2010.
We certainly are encouraged with these holistic, LCA, approaches to sustainability. These are all projects and the more familiar today’s project manager is with these processes the better. We believe that Green Project Management is the future and we, as PM ourselves, want to be on the leading edge of it.
Posted
by
Dave Shirley
on: May 26, 2012 09:43 AM |
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Comments (2)
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 | Anonymous |
Mark,
First, thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to comment. I happen to agree with you that there will be a tradeoff between greenality and cost. Further, greenality will not always be offset by the benefits accrued. The definition of greenality is "the degree to which a company considered environmental (green/sustainability) factors that affect its projects during the entire project lifecycle and beyond." What my partner and I advocate with EarthPM is that greenality should at least be considered in projects. We know that the decision will not always favor the environment/green/sustainability because of those "tradeoffs". Interesting you mention the definition of sustainability, because it is defined in so many ways, from the Bruntland definition, that I won't repeat here, to Auden Schendler's definition in Getting Green Done, "Staying in business forever." We like them all, but Schendler's does convey the Triple Bottom Line - People, Planet, Profits. You need them all to survive.
| Anonymous |
Mark, as Dave, I'm appreciative of your questions.
Let me check the premise that you are assigning to 'green project management'. I think the key misconception in that premise is "cost to the project". Think instead of "cost to the enterprise', and if you will, think, "long-term cost to the enterprise'.
So if one is building a tunnel, and the "cost to the project" to select inexpensive lighting which is unreliable (thus having higher maintenance costs), energy inefficient, the "cost to the project" may make this look like a good decision, when in fact it is the exact wrong thing to do. Note that the words "green", "environment", or "whale" have not come into the equation.
As Dave said, quoting Auden Schendler's book, the project manager should expand their thinking and take the enterprise-wide view and long-term into account. Think "staying in business forever". The altruistic aspects of doing this are there, too - but they don't need to stand on their own as illustrated in case after case after case.
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