Summary

For the 7th episode, I am posting an older (but popular) article on how to green your lean event. This episode gives tips and tricks to making your lean six sigma events and meetings more eco-friendly.

We also include a link in the notes to download a free checklist of these suggestions. There is also a link to the video version of this episode, and a link to a similar checklist for greening 5S events.

Relevant Links

Greening Your Lean Event Checklist (Free)

Video version of this podcast episode for “Greening Your Lean Event”

10 Tips for Greening your 5S events (with free checklist)

Access our past podcast episodes >>>

Transcript

One of the podcasts I listen to is Mark Graban. He does the Lean Audio podcast and what he does is he goes in and talks through some of the post he writes, some of the older ones and including some of the new ones and just kind of reads through and talks to the article; just to make sure that the people get the opportunity to see the article by going to the podcast. So I thought that was a really good idea and so I’m going to try to adopt that and pick out some of the post and articles on the site and read them off to you and then if you want to go back and look at them or read through it, or if want to catch something that you missed when I went through it, you have the opportunity to do that on the site.

The first one I want to go through is called “Tips to green your lean event”

Applying Lean and Six Sigma into your company can have a considerable environmental benefits, even if that’s not the original intent of the event. The elimination of waste can have a positive impact on the environment through reduced materials, reduced travel distance, and less overtime, (which would be reduced lighting and equipment usage) and right sizing containers for material and chemical use, just to name a few of those. You can even make a bigger impact by making sure your event, which can be value stream mapping, 5s, kaizen, radical process improvement, (whatever name you call it) make sure that event is conducted as green as possible. A green event is one that is organized with the goal of minimizing waste and promoting sustainable actions. So on the site, there is a checklist that you can download, it goes through and highlights these different things.

The idea with that is you could review that, look it over before your event, and make sure you’re trying to do as many green things as you can. Obviously, this is not a comprehensive list, so you come up with other ideas, please contact, let me know, and I can add it to the list.

The first section to go through is “Handouts and facilitation materials”

First tip would be to capture notes using computers and overhead projector, instead of writing on flip charts and easel pads, and that will save some paper.

If you need to write on paper pads however, you can get the  static cling reusable easel pads, or smart sheets, or wizard paper or wizard sheets. There’s a couple of different names for them now, they are becoming more popular, but instead of the large post it notepads and flip chart paper, that will also reduce paper.