BARRIERS TO GREEN MANUFACTURING

Green Manufacturing is driven by a number of positive factors, though the manufacturing industry is still faced with some barriers hindering “green” applications to be implemented into practice. The various barriers are:

Fig: Barriers to Green Manufacturing

v  RISK OF BUSINESS: As in every business there is a basic risk to the implementation and success of Green Manufacturing practices. The recent change in the overall thinking, as well as the recent trend of “greener” products does not promise to maintain consistent success over a long period of time. Unforeseeable cultural or social events, like wars for example, can tremendously change the demands and needs of a country’s civilization. But facing the current economic trend, a decrease of interest in sustainable manufacturing is not expected to happen.

v  TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT PRESSURE: Staying on the top of the business in most cases means to be the technological leader, or to be at least at the state of the art. Since green business is here to stay, keeping ahead of the competitors in green technologies and strategies can be very challenging, both from a managerial and financial point of view. The natural selection takes place like in every free market situation and further shows that a specialization into certain technologies or products and systems is the current trend for businesses over the globe. Moreover, competition is one of the main drivers for prices; the lower the prices are, the more people will buy the product. There will be businesses failing off or miss to jump the train for progress to maintain competitive. Hence, every company has to keep an eye on the three pillars of sustainable manufacturing.

v  COMPLEXITY: Applying green manufacturing concepts is not a easy job as it require the analysis of all the processes within organization and thus applying green manufacturing significantly include the total management support, skilled technicians etc.

v  LACK OF TOP MANAGEMENT COMISSION: Leadership is one of the most important drivers for a green approach to manufacturing, but top management positions, like others, contain a certain amount of subjectivity in decision making. Top management thinking is generally profit oriented and thus satisfying top management with green manufacturing concepts is a tedious work and requires a lot of analysis which is again complex and time consuming.

v  HIGH INVESTMENT COST: Sometimes we know about the concept and we knew the benefits but still the investment cost is so high that applying that concept is not possible for an organization.

v  LACK OF VISION AND KNOWLEDGE: As green manufacturing provides profit in long term thus a vision is necessary and a clear picture of concept is required which is lacking in most of conditions. Even if CEO is equipped with the conceptual knowledge, the transfer of knowledge down line (i.e. from management to workers) requires a great commitment of management.