Incorporating lean thinking and life cycle assessment to reduce environmental impacts of plastic injection moulded products

Abstract

a b s t r a c tIn the last decades, environmental footprint of the product manufacture has emerged as an important public concern, causing manufacturers to re-assess their product's environmental impacts. Responding to global outcry on global warming, world leaders have agreed to limit global temperature rise to less than 2 C above the temperature in pre-industrial times. As a result, governments and industrial leaders around the world have proposed a roadmap for 80% emissions reduction by 2050. The aim of this work develops a novel approach of linking Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Lean manufacturing to reduce the negative environmental impacts of a plastic injection moulded product. Products that use plastic as their primary source of raw materials are mainly produced by plastic injection processes. Although plastic injection moulding has many benefits such as 'high production rates', there is a lack of through investigation on the effects of this process has on the environment such as climate change, ozone depletion etc. This paper proposes a novel cross-functional mapping approach of linking lean-thinking and LCA. The implementation case study has been presented with the view to re-assess carbon footprint of an existing plastic product. The reported implementation work demonstrates that the adaptation of lean thinking and LCA could significantly minimise negative environmental impacts of a plastic injection product. A case study indicates that the overall environmental impact has been reduced by approximately 40% in climate change, human toxicity, photochemical oxidant formation, acidification and ecotoxicity.

A Systematic Literature Review for Better Understanding of Lean Driven Sustainability

“…In a past study, TPM was shown to be among ten lean tools that simultaneously help with productivity and environmental efficiency [4]. Reduced defect rate, decreased number of machine failures, and alleviated time inefficiencies were achieved by TPM implementation in a past study [222]. The contribution of TPM to environmental performance due to increased machine life, reduced hazardous leakage, and emissions is also evident in the literature [138,165,169].…”

“…However, it does not have any practical tools to measure sustainable performance. That is, the underlying reason of its integration with other methodologies such as lean, LCA, six-sigma, and TQM [137,219,[221][222][223][224]. Many lean tools were used to derive sustainability solutions at both intraand inter-organizational levels [169,225,226].…”

“…The future state map also indicated a substantially lower level of air acidification and carbon emissions. In a more recent study, Cheung et al, (2017) incorporated lean and LCA methodologies to reduce the environmental impact of production processes of plastic injection molded parts [222]. Through deployment of the proposed framework, 40% combined performance enhancement in climate change impact, human toxicity, photochemical oxidant formation, acidification, and eco-toxicity was recorded.…”

Comparison of Four Environmental Assessment Tools in Swedish Manufacturing: A Case Study

“…Input and output data across the system boundaries were collected, validated and normalized. Examples of studies deploying LCA in manufacturing include Cheung et al [49]; Zhang and Haapala [50]; Thammaraksa et al [51], among others.…”

Uso y aplicación de herramientas del modelo de producción Toyota: una revisión de literatura

“…Durante las últimas décadas, la huella ambiental de la fabricación de productos se ha convertido en una Herramienta preocupación de carácter público, lo que hace que las empresas revalúen los impactos ambientales de la fabricación [26]. En el trabajo de [27] se propone un modelo integrador entre LM y producción más limpia (PML) denominado LCPC (Lean CleanerProduction Benchmarking), este busca la evaluación de la producción más limpia en empresas de diferentes tamaños.…”