Productivity Reimagined

8Productive Strategies for Preserving Our Planet

As we’ve discussed throughout this book, removing waste from processes is a powerful weapon for improving productivity. It is also the key to ensuring a sustainable future on our planet. Accordingly, saving our planet and improving the performance of a business can go hand in hand.

Many of the practices aimed at mitigating climate change, however, are misguided and inefficient because they fail to get to the root causes of waste. The myths of segmented success and tech omnipotence are largely to blame for this. In this chapter, we’ll see how innovative leaders are shattering these myths to make tangible progress against climate change.

HEATING THE OUTDOORS

One of the defining features of a typical Canadian town is its local arena – a facility with artificial ice used for two of Canada’s favorite sports: curling and hockey. These arenas are easy to recognize because each has a smokestack-like structure rising out of the roof with steam coming out of it.

The stack is a device called a cooling tower. Its function is to dispel the heat generated by the chillers that cool the ice surface. The irony is that the facility is expending energy to transfer heat from indoors to outdoors during the cold Canadian winter.

“They’re actually paying to get rid of that heat after they’ve moved it by running a cooling tower,” says Bruce Taylor, president of Elmira, Ontario–based consultancy Enviro-Stewards. “Then they use natural gas to heat the ...