Just-in-time production and eco-efficiency

Abstract

Eco-efficiency is a sound and meaningful concept to every business considering a step into the future. On the one side, it shows the pathway for providing what all companies strive for, i.e., effective and progressively delivering more value. On the other side, it considers doing so in a constrained world, where climate change, use of nature, and social fairness are the burning challenges for most societies, which can no longer be postponed nor ignored. The way forward seems to be the intent and will to provide more value with safer and lower environmental impacts and the urgency to actually embrace and fully tackle that endeavor. Just in time production along with continuous improvement has the potential and indeed provides a possible route to eco-efficient shop floor operations. Although granting the economic production of goods and a progressive delink from the use of nature, their encouraging contribution seems rather unintentional, while there seems to be some other aspects that need further clarification. Altogether, these approaches could benefit from a more systematic and focused goal of delivering value with minimum impacts, bearing in mind a more comprehensive understating of full life cycle implications and the potential gains conceivable only within collective solutions. Additionally, their rationale could be prospectively deployed outside their normal space of application, on activities known to hold structural waste.