A few years ago, most conversations about process improvement were pretty straightforward. You’d map a workflow, look for waste, tighten things up, maybe automate a step or two. The goal was always the same — faster, cheaper, more efficient.
Lately though, something else has started creeping into those conversations - Carbon.
Not as a separate ESG report sitting somewhere else in the business, but as part of the actual process map itself.
What’s interesting is how quickly teams are realising that a lot of operational waste and carbon waste are actually the same thing wearing different labels.
I was working with a manufacturing team not long ago where they started overlaying energy use onto their value stream map. At first, they expected the big emissions drivers to be obvious — production volume, machinery, transport.
But that’s not what stood out.
It was the small stuff.
Machines left running between batches because changeovers weren’t sequenced properly. Forklifts doing extra loops around the warehouse because staging areas weren’t well designed. Scrap being reprocessed multiple times because quality issues weren’t being caught early.
Individually, none of it looked dramatic. Just “how the day works.”
But once it was mapped properly, the cumulative impact was hard to ignore.
And the funny thing is, fixing it didn’t really require a sustainability program. It required good process thinking. Better sequencing. Fewer handoffs. Cleaner flow. Standard work that actually matched reality.
What we’re starting to see is that carbon starts to behave like another form of process waste. Waiting, rework, excess movement — they all show up in emissions as much as they do in cost or time.
The shift for a lot of improvement teams now is pretty simple: stop treating sustainability as something separate.
Because once you see the system properly, it’s all the same problem.
Bad flow just costs you in more ways than one.