Overproduction: 7 Wastes, An Environmental Perspective

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It’s no surprise that the Toyota 7 Wastes add a huge burden to companies – and most companies don’t even know it.  As reference, the 7 Wastes are:

1. Transportation
2. Inventory
3. Motion
4. Waiting
5. Overproduction
6. Overprocessing
7. Defects

But what about the burden on the earth?  In this series, I’ll attempt to highlight the Toyota 7 Wastes and their impacts on the environment.  Today, we’ll begin with Overproduction.

• More raw materials and energy is consumed in making the unnecessary products
• Extra products may spoil or become obsolete, requiring disposal
• Extra hazardous material used result in extra emissions, extra waste disposal, worker exposure
• More space is required to hold overproduced products
• Possible write-downs or over-discounting because of over-supply of products, harming business profitability and possibly leading to employee layoffs

It’s Your Turn

What other environmental impacts come from the waste of overproduction?  Does it matter?  Thinking about how to reduce Overproduction, how would you do that for environmentally-specific problems?  Would Kanban work just as effectively?  Don’t build unless there’s a customer pull to build?

	This post was written by Pete Abilla