GreenProductivityforSustainableEnergyandEnvironment:NeedoftheHour

Sameer Pushp writes: The process of Industrial

growth plays a vital role in economic development, but any Industrial growth seems to go hand-
in-hand with environmental deterioration. Several decades of applying the conventional
methods to reduce environmental damage has proved to be just treating the symptoms, the
world is suffering from disease of environmental damage and a fear of getting it chronic is a
possibility. It is high time to combine technological solutions to overcome urgent pollution
problems with ways to prevent wastes from being generated or to reuse their valuable material.
We, in India, are mindful of this growing problem and have started interventions in form of
awareness and practical solutions to reduce the impact of environmental degradation. To
reinforce this belief, National Productivity Council, under the Ministry of Commerce & Industry, is
celebrating Productivity Week from 12th to 18th February, 2011 with a theme ‘Green Productivity
for Sustainable Energy and Environment’. The Productivity Week will revolve around the core
concept of ‘Green Productivity (GP)’.
A New Paradigm
Green Productivity is a new paradigm in sustainable manufacturing where resource
conservation and waste minimization constitute the strategy in simultaneously enhancing
environmental performance and productivity. This productivity approach to the sustainability of
industries requires the adoption of clean production technology and the development of
appropriate indicators and instruments to measure environmental performance in a continuous
improvement strategy that focuses on the manufacturing stage of the product life cycle. The
analysis may be expanded to include the entire life cycle with increasing details on impacts,
improvement strategies and indicators.
Green Productivity is the well-rounded socio-economic development that emphasizes on
sustainable improvement in the quality of human life with minimum or no damage to the
environment. It is the combined application of appropriate productivity and environmental
management tools, techniques and technologies that reduce the environmental impact of an
organization’s activities, products and services while enhancing profitability and competitive
advantage.
Green Growth Dynamism
The thrust of the productivity week is to focus on generating awareness on the eco-efficiency
considerations and energy efficiency perspectives, which will be supported by principles of
ecological economics and impinged by equations of eco-financing and investments and returns
cycles. Strategic action by firms and stakeholders including consumers are increasingly focused
on eco-design initiatives including product improvement, product–redesign. The aim is to
explore future scope in harvesting green consumerism and green growth dynamics and
emergence of eco-cities and eco-industrial parks that would foster an eco-culture across
boundaries on our planet.
Green Productivity as a principle and strategy has gained wider understanding, stronger support and eventually
being applied for enhancing productivity and environmental performance for sustainable socio-economic
development. Exploitation of non-renewable energy sources on one hand resulted in depleting the natural energy
reservoirs while on the other hand, due to excessive and imbalanced use, it made the world face one of the
toughest challenges, Global Warming. Rise in sea levels, fluctuations in the rainfall and frequent droughts are some
of the impacts of the environmental damage. All these concerns made us introspect on the situation and this led to
the incubation of the concept of Green Productivity for sustainable development.
Substantial Gains
Traditional focus of the productivity was to ensure cost-effectiveness through cost reduction, the
quality drive and the customer satisfaction. Now, along with these, productivity improvement
programs are also required to integrate environment issues. GP helps company increase its
productivity and it is applicable not only to manufacturing, but also to the service, information,
and agricultural sectors, more so to government and community economic development. By
picking up the baton of quality, productivity has metamorphosed to incorporate environmental
protection and community enhancement as a means to increase prosperity.
The challenges of shifting to a pathway of sustainable development embracing the energy &
environmental issues are substantial. Improvements in energy management and pollution-
reduction technologies will offset some of the problems associated with projected future growth
in population. Therefore, Green productivity was launched with the prime objectives to address
the issues of increasing profitability, improvement in health and safety, making quality products,
promotion of  environmental protection,  regulatory compliance, building up company’s image
and raise employees morale which will subsequently lead to holistic growth and development.
Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Nature is enough to satisfy man’s need but not sufficient for man’s
greed.” In this fierce race of globalization, countries of the world have lost the faculty to decipher
the difference between need and greed. They are rapidly being trapped into the sands of
materialism and thus failing to draw the line. This blurred distinction has consequently resulted
boom to the consumerist concept leading to the crude display of extravagance and has thus
ushered mindless production of goods and services.
Productivity and competitiveness are the two faces of a same coin. Competitiveness of a nation
is linked to the productivity growth and ability of a nation to improve its competitiveness is
measured by its environmental performance in addition to more traditional economic criteria.
This makes the concept of Green Productivity a simple but elegant solution – to make
environmental protection a core business principle instead of an isolated cost element. “Green
Productivity for sustainable Energy and Environment” as a chosen theme for the ‘Productivity
Week-20ll is the need of the hour.