Exploring the role of lean thinking in sustainable business practice: A systematic literature review

Abstract

The shift towards sustainable manufacturing processes and products has influenced business organizations to improve their environmental performance and efficiency. 'Lean thinking' has evolved to 'lean and green thinking' as a targeted intervention for organizations to implement sustainable business models that reduce waste and improve material efficiency, and subsequently minimise costs. The lean and green concept however is still relatively new and it remains unclear for many as to how exactly lean thinking can contribute to the sustainability transformation of organizations. The objective of this research was to undertake a systematic literature review of how the implementation of lean and green initiatives could lead to sustainable business practice. This article includes an analysis of both conceptual and empirical research papers discussing various industrial contexts, and evaluation of: a) the impact of lean methods on environmental performance; and b) the variety of integrated lean and green models.The review highlights the ad hoc and limited use of lean thinking within corporate sustainability initiatives and the authors establish a 'lean and green matrix' that identifies opportunities to embed lean and green practices in five common work streams including waste, energy, emissions, water and chemical management. In addition to comparing different industries and their systems, this review provides a reference point for further investigation into lean and green practices. The findings contribute to the authors' research agenda that aims to develop a replicable system for holistically exploring strategies in corporate environmental management and prioritising the most appropriate lean methods. It is proposed that industrial practitioners could benefit from such a system, which could transform their organization's performance through well-integrated and aligned sustainable business practices.

The Effectiveness of Lean Construction Tools in the Malaysian Construction Industry Towards Contractor’s Environmental Performance

“…The performances are reducing construction wastes, compliance with local authority's or government requirement, reducing the energy consumption of the project and producing a neat and clean site environment [13][14][15][16]. The findings proved a research by Caldera et al [12] that the implementation of LC can improve the contractor's environmental performance…”

“…According to Caldera et al [12], the implementation of LC can improve the environmental performance of a construction project. Previously, in placing more emphasis, Ciarniene and Vienazindiene [13] stated that the implementation of LC tools will reduce the construction wastes at the site as per Table 2.…”

A Systematic Literature Review for Better Understanding of Lean Driven Sustainability

“…Abreu et al, (2017) reviewed 27 papers (out of 85) with lean-green models to identify commonly used KPIs designed to assess factors, such as time, efficiency, cost, waste, corruption risk, emissions, and supplier selection/relationship [139]. Caldera et al, (2017) focused on the identification of the contributions of lean to sustainability in terms of cost and waste reduction, as well as improvements in environmental performance [140]. Sarkis and Zhu (2017) reviewed articles published in the International Journal of Production Research (IJPR) to identify the current state-of-the-art in terms of sustainability and production research integration [76].…”

“…[21,78,82,109,132,257] Lack of comprehensive lean-driven sustainability frameworks that could simultaneously generate solutions for various sustainability issues of organizations and supply chains. [88,140] Limited co-implementation of lean-driven sustainability principles in service, healthcare and education sectors. [10,92,109,261] Limited research on social dimension of sustainability.…”

Rethinking the Way of Doing Business: A Reframe of Management Structures for Developing Corporate Sustainability

“…Corporate Sustainability performance [44][45][46][47][48][49] Corporate Sustainability and strategic management [34,50,51] Sustainable business models [49,52] Corporate Sustainability reporting [13,30,53,54] Corporate Sustainability frameworks, tools and practices [55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64] Sustainable supply chain [65] Environmental Corporate Sustainability [66,67] Adopting Corporate Sustainability in specific countries/regions [68,69] Table 1 presents the literature reviews in CS grouped in seven key areas of research. These literature reviews are fundamentally important to advance the state of the art in CS; however, they have specific focus on certain areas of CS research.…”