Some thoughts as I try to tie up loose ends so I can leave tomorrow morning for PlantSuccess in Houston.
For nearly a decade, all we heard was "global warming" and the threats to the environment and the society it would produce. This caused enormous controversy. Partisans on both sides (maybe there are more than two sides), all sides, have distorted and falsified data to make their cases.
But the fact remains that climate is changing, and the growing human population, and industrialization are having some effect on the changes.
But whe you look at the issue from the point of view of manufacturing and long term strategies, the solutions all cluster around "sustainability."
Sustainability may or may not mitigate climate change. But from the point of view of society and our ability to maximize resource use here on the planet, that doesn't matter.
What the sociopolitical push toward reaction to climate change has done is to widen the economic calculus once again (as it did in the 1960s about air and water pollution) so that behaving sustainably can show up as a profit line on the balance sheet.
And once we started to get into investigating sustainability in manufacturing, we quickly found we had uncovered a hitherto undiscovered source of new ways to increase revenue, increase productivity, and at the same time, improve the brand images of our companies.
Once we figured that out, it didn't take a big stretch to get most companies in line with sustainable manufacturing practices...as we will surely see at PlantSuccess.
That's part of what I am going to talk about tomorrow afternoon. If you want to hear it, come on along.
You can get more information on PlantSuccess at http://www.plantsuccess.com
