But there’s more! How can we implement these novel manufacturing impact reducing ideas not just in the countries that are already way up the curve (or “developed”) but those that are climbing? We should be able to implement production technology in emerging economies as well so they don’t have to create all the challenges we have first. This will be the topic of a future posting since, obviously, the technology must match the situation.
Wouldn’t this be better than just betting on productivity, traditionally measured, to save the day? Isn’t betting on productivity sort of like saying the solution is digging faster?
In fact, our friends at McKinsey are already worried about this. In a recent, January 2015 MGI report they ask the question with respect to global growth: can productivity save the day in an aging world? The manufacturing strategies mentioned above to reduce impact per unit of GDP will not work for service industries – a large part of the McKinsey study and many economies – but a more enlightened view of productivity, meaning resource productivity, will help drive these technologies for both emerging and developed economies alike.
So, not only will we stop digging … we’ll throw away the shovel!
David Dornfeld is the Will C. Hall Family Chair in Engineering in Mechanical Engineering at University of California Berkeley. He leads the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability (LMAS), and he writes the Green Manufacturing blog. This article was republished with permission from David Dornfeld.
