Lean-green manufacturing practices and their link with sustainability: a critical review

The current rapidly changing and highly competitive market has put companies under a great pressure towards adopting sustainable practices, in terms of keeping a healthy balance among economic, environmental and social performances. In this context, the lean-green manufacturing approach, which combines lean practices focused on customers’ demand, and green practices focused on reducing the business’ environmental impact, has gained popularity. Nevertheless, the lean-green manufacturing is still a relatively new practice, lacking a clear and structured research definition, and of significant evidence of successful cases in the practice. In this paper, a literature review is conducted to identify the actual possibility of combining lean and green practices, the current trends for implementing such combination and the potential sustainability improvements such implementation can lead. It is the authors’ intention that the findings analysed in this paper can contribute to the state-of-the-art of lean-green manufacturing and provide practitioners with a useful tool towards developing effective strategies for its deployment.