The Role of Lean Manufacturing Practices in Greener Production: A Way to Reach Sustainability

Due to globalization and competitive market, sustainability has increasingly gained importance to the manufacturing industry and Lean approaches are becoming more and more outstanding in order to improve operational and competitive performance. In addition, currently, firms have become more conscious of the fact that it is no longer adequate to take care of economic aspects, being crucial to take care of social and environmental aspects to succeed in the current and future markets. Lean manufacturing provides quality products at minimum cost to satisfy the customer. Aims of Lean manufacturing are to identify and eliminate the production process wastages for quality improvement, cost reduction, on-time delivery, i.e. to make efficient production processes to face the highest competition level, so lean is the latest tool to achieve it. While the aim of the Greener production is an environmental improvement of production processes by adopting best practices and seeking to eliminate waste and waste generation manufacturing processes. This research investigates how the Lean and Green practices and tools are being used for improvements in social, economic and environmental performance that directly affect overall business performance. The findings show that, a strong synergy linkingbetween Lean and Green and that a lot of Lean practices and tools can positively contribute to environmental sustainability which will help for both academicians and practitioners to take the advantage of their synergistic effects for achieving sustainable development in the manufacturing industry.