Eliminating the Barriers of Green Lean Practices with Thinking Processes

Abstract

The Green Lean (GL) approach aims to prevent environmental waste, ensure ecological balance and sustainability, and achieve this economically and effectively. Since the second half of the 20th century, Lean is a management philosophy that businesses apply to increase their performance, increase customer satisfaction, and ensure sustainability and continuous development. It is known that the protection of scarce resources in the world, when applied together with the Green approach for a sustainable economy, creates synergy and provides more practical benefits to the environment and humanity. However, performing these GL applications may not always give the desired effect due to the obstacles encountered. Many authors have investigated the factors affecting the success of GL and made recommendations. In this study, the root causes of these obstacles were reached by applying the Theory of Constraints Thinking Process with a different approach, the undesirable effects they created were examined, and solutions were presented to overcome these obstacles. With the proliferation of successful GL applications, it is expected that pollution in the world will decrease, more efficient and economical production and scarce resources will be used accurately, and thus a sustainable green economy will be provided. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.