MeanGene Rants 5
May 2002
Chauffagistes, Chemicals On Loan and The Death of The Carpet
Industry
Cool
Stuff
·
Beaming
Solar Power from the Moon http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/lunarpower020422.html
·
Previously
we brought you "Brewing Beer -> Hydrogen" ... http://www.sustdev.org/journals/edition.01/preview/1.103.shtml ...
·
Now
we bring you "Taking a Poop -> Hydrogen" http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992230
·
Incadescent
Lamp - Improved from 5% to 60% Efficient. http://www.sandia.gov/media/NewsRel/NR2002/tungsten.htm
An ounce
of prevention is a pound of cure as the saying goes. But an ounce of
conservation by a consumer is usually only an ounce of energy saved. On the
other hand, an ounce of waste eliminated in design, manufacturing or other
upstream processes can be many pounds of savings, and many dollars saved too.
All of
this has the ominous reek of a lecture about conservation, or a touchy-feely
"think different" campaign, doesn't it? Actually, it is the insights
of the father of one of the world's largest automotive corporation's production
system.
"The
most ferocious foe of waste human history has produced" was Taiichi Ohno
(1912-90), the father of Toyota Production System. Ohno created an intellectual
and cultural framework for eliminating waste - which he defined as "any
human activity which absorbs resources but creates no value." "He
opposed every form of waste." The different forms have more recently been
classified into specifics such as "mistakes which require rectification,
production of items no one wants so that inventories and remaindered goods pile
up, processing steps which aren't actually needed, movement of employees and
transport of goods from one place to another without any purpose, groups of
people in a downstream activity standing around waiting because an upstream
activity has not delivered on time, and goods and services which don't meet the
needs of the customer."
Ohno
called these muda, which is Japanese for "waste",
"futility", or "purposelessness".
Eliminating
muda often involves shedding traditional notions of maximizing the efficiency
of each step in a process for the notion of maximizing the entire process. The
differences can be startling.
"Consider
the typical production of glass windshields for cars." Maximizing each
step in an existing process has put pressure on making the most expensive step
as efficient as possible.
Economies-of-scale
thinking says that the giant float-glass furnace should be as large as
possible: a theoretically ideal situation would be if all the flat glass in the
world could be made in a single plant. Big, flat sheets of glass emerge from
the furnace and are cut into pieces somewhat larger than a windshield. The
glass is cooled, packed, crated, and shipped 500 miles to the fabricator.
There, 47 days later, it's unpacked and cut to shape, losing 25 percent in the
process. It is then reheated and drooped or pressed into the right curving
shape. (Because each car model has different specifications, huge batches of
windshields are shaped at once while a given set of dies is installed.) Then
the glass is cooled, repackaged, and shipped 430 miles to the glass
encapsulator. There, 41 days later, it's unpacked, fitted with the right edge
seals and other refinements, repacked, and shipped another 560 miles to the car
factory. There, 12 days later, it's unpacked and installed in the car. Over 100
days have elapsed and the glass has traveled nearly 1,500 miles, almost none of
which contributes to customer value.
Now,
does that sounds more efficient than manufacturing in "a small plant at
the same place as the car factory, [carrying] out all the steps in the
production process in immediate succession under one roof, even though several
machines and companies might be involved"?
Sadly,
this anecdotal tale of inefficient production seems more the rule than an
abberation. A cynic may say it's the result of having lots of smart MBA's
optimize a process they don't understand. Fortunately, the basic idea of
eliminating muda is gaining ground, mostly because it saves its practioners
tons of money.
It is
easy to imagine saving time and energy in the windshield process described
above, but solutions generally seem easy and obvious after they are found. The
following stories demonstrate revolutionary solutions that come from insightful
thinking about "service and flow". Eliminating muda translates
directly to saving moolah. And saving moolah is the same as making it, after
all, a penny saved, is a penny earned.
Briefly
mentioned before in Mean Gene's Energy News, "ten million buildings in
metropolitan France have long been heated by "chauffagistes"; in
1995, 160 firms in this business employed 28,000 professionals. Rather than
selling raw energy in the form of oil, gas, or electricity -none of which is
what the customer really wants,- namely warmth - these firms contract to keep a
client's floor space within a certain temperature range during certain hours at
a certain cost. The rate is normally set to be somewhat below that of
traditional heating methods like oil furnaces; how it's achieved is the
contractors' business. They can convert your furnace to gas, make your heating
system more efficient, or even insulate your building. They're paid for results
- warmth - not for how they do it or how much of what inputs they use to do it.
The less energy and materials they use - the more efficient they are -the more
money they make. Competition between chauffagistes pushes down the market price
of that "warmth service."
Some
American firms are now beginning to test this concept. Carrier, the world's
leading maker of air-conditioning equipment, decided that it might as well
capture that very efficient and reliable equipment's operating benefits by
offering "coolth services."
Dow
Chemical Company does an extensive business leasing organic solvents, many of
which are toxic or flammable or both. A consumer who purchases them is left
with the responsibility of safely handling and disposing of them. But through
the lease provisions of Dow or its competitor SafetyKleen, that chemical
company's experts will deliver the solvent, help with its application, work
with the client to recover the solvent again, and take it away. The customer
never owns it and is never liable for it; it belongs to the provider of the
"dissolving services" but is always available to do your job. Dow's
German affiliate SafeChem, which has increased some solvents' life above one
hundred uses, plans to take the next logical step - charging by the square inch
degreased rather than by the gallon used - thereby incentivizing itself to use
fewer rather than more gallons. It's in a good position to do this, having
developed special airtight shipping containers to eliminate evaporative losses.
(Even better would be to use benign or no solvents.)
This
concept is rapidly spreading in the chemical industry: A Dutch firm, for
example, has made a success of leasing photographic chemicals, cycling them
many times, and recovering valuable silver en route. (Again, there's a benign
competitor: Imation's DryView eliminates the chemicals.) Ciba's Pigment Division
is moving to provide "color services" rather than merely selling dyes
and pigments. Cookson in England leases the insulating service of refractory
liners for steel furnaces, helping to close their materials loop. The service
concept has also become standard practice in the fast-moving world of
information services. Xerox runs document distribution centers instead of just
leasing copiers (they collect the original and you get it back with your
copies). Pitney Bowes handles your firm's mail instead of just leasing postage
meters. In data processing, revenues from bundled service provision are growing
faster than either hardware or software sales. Again, what the customer wants
and gets is the function; what equipment the provider uses, and how it does the
job, is immaterial.
Perhaps
the most novel and exciting application of the service-flow concept is emerging
at Interface in Atlanta, the leading innovator in what used to be called the
carpet business. Traditionally, old-fashioned broadloom carpet is replaced
every decade because it develops worn spots. An office must be shut down,
furniture removed, carpet torn up and sent to landfill, new carpet laid down,
the office restored, operations resumed, and workers perhaps exposed to
carpet-glue fumes. It takes two pounds of fossil fuel to turn one pound of
mainly petrobased feedstock into carpet, plus an additional amount to transport
it to the customer and back to the landfill, where it resides for the next
20,000 years or so. Over 5 billion pounds of the carpet now in landfills has
Interface's name on it. Chairman Ray Anderson realized that not throwing more
energy and money into holes in the ground represents a major business
opportunity.
Interface
therefore launched a transition from selling carpet to leasing floor-covering
services. People want to walk on and look at carpet, not own it. They can
obtain those services at much lower cost if Interface owns the carpet and
remains responsible for keeping it clean and fresh in return for a monthly fee
under the company's Evergreen Lease. Whenever indicated by monthly inspections,
Interface replaces overnight the 10-20 percent of the carpet tiles that show
80-90 percent of the wear. This reduces the amount of carpet material required
by about 80 percent because the unworn part of the carpet is left in place. It
also provides better service at reduced life-cycle cost, increases net
employment (less manufacturing but more upkeep), and eliminates disruption, since
worn tiles are seldom under furniture. Because the carpet is laid in the form
of tiles, glue fumes are also significantly reduced or possibly eliminated. The
customer's former capital investment becomes a lease expense.
So far
so good: a Factor Five saving in materials, plus considerable energy and money.
But Interface's latest technical innovation goes much further in turning waste
into savings. Other manufacturers are starting to "downcycle"
nylon-and-PVC-based carpet into a lower-quality use - backing - thus losing the
embodied energy value of the nylon. Interface has instead made a novel
polymeric material into a new kind of floor-covering service, called Solenium,
that can be completely remanufactured back into itself. All worn materials can
and will be completely separated into their components, fiber and backing, and
each component remade into an identical fresh product. The production process
is also simpler (several key steps become unnecessary) and less wasteful:
Manufacturing the upper surface produces 99.7 percent less waste than making
normal carpet, and the other 0.3 percent gets reused. The new product also
provides markedly better service. It's highly stain-resistant, and does not
mildew. It is easily cleaned with water, is 35 percent less
materials-intensive, and yet is four times as durable, so it uses sevenfold
less massflow per unit of service. It is suited to renewable feedstocks, and is
acoustically and aesthetically improved - so superior in every respect that it
won't even be marketed as an environmental product. In fact, it creates a new
category of flooring, combining the durability of resilient flooring with the
acoustics and aesthetics of soft flooring. It also comes installed, maintained,
and reclaimed under a service lease. Compared with standard nylon broadloom
carpet, Solenium's combination of improved physical attributes (Factor Seven
less massflow from dematerialization and greater durability) and the service
lease (a further Factor Five less massflow from replacing only the worn parts)
multiplies to a reduction in the net flow of materials and embodied LOW energy
by 97 percent - Factor 31. Manufacturing cost is also substantially reduced and
margin increased.
The source for the story about "Muda" is the excellent book Natural Capitalism, published by the Rocky Mountain Institute and available for complete reading (FREE) at http://www.natcap.org. I highly recommend this book and will probably include more snippets from it later. If you read it online, read it in PDF form, the HTML form provides only snippets and the PDF is much nicer to read.