You Can Improve Productivity, Reduce Costs, and Be More Competitive. Managing Your Company's Environmental Impacts Is a Key First Step.

Here are three reasons manufacturers should manage their environmental impacts: competitiveness, compliance, and community. You can reduce waste, lower production costs, and run your plant more efficiently. You can effectively address outside influences such as dealing with regulations or potential legal liabilities. And, you can help improve community relations where your employees and customers live.

Taking a good, hard look at your company's production processes helps identify opportunities to be more efficient and cut down on unnecessary waste and rejects. Getting a clear picture of where you stand regarding environmental compliance may help lessen liability and regulatory burdens. And, dealing with environmental issues says to customers and employees that you're concerned about quality and being a well-run company.

We can help you get started in the process. We offer a full range of manufacturing and environmental support services to enhance the competitive edge of smaller manufacturers throughout the area.

Our team of engineers and technical experts provides a general analysis of a facility's operation its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. They review a company's financial management, production processes, inventory management, quality and information systems, human resource issues, as well as its environmental impacts. All of these areas are interconnected. If there's a problem with one, it'll affect different parts of the company as well.

Among other things, we identify costs associated with waste management, pollution control, and compliance monitoring. Knowing these costs, a manufacturer can begin to determine what changes can be made to reduce them.

For example, if we find that a production step creates a nonrecyclable byproduct, we can help to re-engineer the process or choose a material with recyclable byproducts.

Hundreds of companies have benefited from our environmental services and dozens of examples may be reviewed on the NIST-MEP website.

All industry sectors can benefit from integrated manufacturing and environmental assessment services. The most obvious ones are those that are under increasing pressure to meet environmental requirements and incur higher compliance costs. This includes metal finishers and coaters, metal fabricators, printers, the electronics industry, and printed wire-board manufacturers. Nevertheless, the program has also benefited other sectors such as the food processing industry, where attention is focused on reducing processed food wastes, fats, oils, and grease in the wastewater.

In addition, companies that have not upgraded equipment in the past 10 years or those heavily reliant on pollution control equipment should look for more efficient approaches to production or consider investments in new technology. Environmental assessments provide road maps that we can help implement for companies aiming to improve their overall productivity and competiveness.

Common Issues

A key issue is the use of a facility's equipment and finding the most efficient ways to reduce waste throughout the production process. For example, the generation of off-spec products, rejects, scrap, and rework might indicate poor standard operating practices, contamination issues, or that quality parameters might be higher than needed for the end product.

Other typical areas we focus on include the amount of hazardous and solid waste generated and the costs or the amount of wastewater generated and discharged, the type and level of contaminants present in the wastewater, and the costs. We'll also look at inventory storage and tracking procedures to see if materials are being stored properly to avoid deterioration and in sufficient quantities needed for production without exceeding those needs.

There are many other areas that may come up in the course of an assessment to help improve a company's efficiency, including production scheduling to minimize waste, how parts are cleaned and the degree of cleanliness required, energy consumption, general facility housekeeping, as well as conformity with regulatory requirements.

All scrap, energy losses, and pollution are waste within a production unit. Reduction of these are directly related to the material costs of making any product. Often the costs of waste are lumped into overhead. While a company may anticipate some shrinkage or loss of raw materials during the production process, these losses could be significantly reduced with current technology, optimized processes, and good work practices. We specifically gear the environmental assessment towards uncovering hidden costs that are being overlooked or embedded within the manufacturing process.

Additionally, the cost to document and manifest hazardous waste is labor hours spent not doing value-added work. Claims by manufacturers that they make money selling scrap lose sight of the cost of scrap as virgin material. Innovations to reduce waste usually result in an improved final product that can compete better for market share and command a better price.

Services Offered

We offer a range of services designed to improve a company's efficiency. For example, total environmental cost accounting allows a firm to measure its before and after costs for such expenses as training, material purchases, labor time required, permitting fees, waste hauling, equipment purchases, fines, litigation costs, and other externalities not often captured by traditional accounting methods.

We also are involved in identifying technology alternatives, re-engineering production cells to reduce or eliminate waste or scrap, doing performance benchmarking, providing life cycle analysis, identifying markets to recycle scrap, installing technology or processes to accept scrap materials, offering ISO 14000 assistance, as well as providing energy, environment, and manufacturing assessments.

The aim is to move a company toward clean manufacturing one that considers the environmental impacts when faced with options for manufacturing equipment and materials. A clean manufacturer will recognize the advantages of minimizing waste production and will build processes to prevent pollution rather than just dealing with it as a post-production issue.

To find out more about environmental assistance for manufacturers, contact The Nebraska Industrial Competitiveness Service (NICS) @ 402-437-2535or call 1-800-MEP-4MFG. NICSis a not-for-profit organization that assist small- and medium-sized manufacturers. It is affiliated with the national NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership.