The first step in our green manufacturing design journey is getting the full picture of the footprint of the current
manufacturing processes. This starts right into the theme of extraordinary collaboration with our factories (also known as co-packers or contract manufacturers in the biz) since we need them to paint the full picture for us of how they conduct their operations: where they source materials from, how they run their facilities, what energy, water and material uses they have, and where the sources of waste are – not typically information that is shared with your clients to say the least.
What has made this process work so far is the willingness of the copackers to learn, to admit that they’ve got a ways to go yet, and their desire to become the best at getting greener, to paraphrase someone insightful.
We’ve been at this for a few months, and now have a working format of environmental metrics that we’ll be implementing at all of these factories (more to come as that happens!), as well as detailed maps of all of the production processes relating all of their environmental inputs and effects. From these maps, we’ve been listing our priorities to green the processes – areas of waste materials, unnecessary energy or water use, and so on, and will be chasing these down over the coming period.
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This is a very important issue. Most manufacturers do not know what is the footprint for theri processes, raw materials, packaging and not even know their water or energy consumption per product or manufacturing department.