As with higher labor productivity which bolsters a nation’s labor-cost advantage, higher resource productivity maintains a strong resource-cost advantage.
More value, lower impact – sounds like something we should look into.
It is sort of like the term used in the aerospace industry – the “buy to fly ratio.” This term came up in this blog back in July of 2010 as part of a discussion on Degrees of Perfection. It is, in a nutshell, the amount of material, for example, that ends up flying on the aircraft normalized by the amount that was purchased and processed at the start of the production line. It is often, for some aerospace components, a very low number.
But we also see this in other products. You may recall a conversation on this back in June of 2011 under the topic of Less can be more based on some research by Professor Julian Allwood at Cambridge University on the yield of material in processing to create some common products – like beverage cans, automotive panels, etc. But Professor Allwood is more careful in his counting. He doesn’t just track yield gate to gate in part of the production but all the way from the melt on creation to the finished product. In the case of both steel and aluminum the “cumulative yield” (meaning the amount of material from the raw stock – in this case liquid metal in the ladle after it was refined – to the finished product) was as low as 40-50% in some cases and, for some aerospace components fabricated of aluminum, in the low ‘teens.
And the “cumulative impact” of that material when it finally got into a product necessarily included the energy that processed the “wasted” material along the path to production. Just because you recycle material that is left on the shop floor doesn’t mean you “hit the reset button” on imbedded energy, or its environmental impact, in the product.
This did not mean that the manufacturers were being necessarily wasteful – just that the process technology was not able to extract more finished product out of the material without large amounts of waste.
This is not usually accounted for (except in the price of the component which reflects the material and processing supply chain). But the associated impacts for sure aren’t accounted for.
What if we were measuring, along with labor productivity, the resource productivity? Would this drive us to innovate in the process technology to improve the “buy to fly ratio”? It would reduce the impact in proportion to the increase in yield of material processed – less waste means, in addition to less cost, less impact. Each kg of wasted material has embedded energy, water, and other resources in it.
