Green is free: Creating sustainable competitive advantage through green excellence

Three decades ago, in his book Quality is Free, Philip Crosby observed that improving quality could actually save money. This challenged a fundamental assumption of the day and set managers and researchers off on a 30-year journey of learning and improvement that changed the way we understand the relationship between cost and quality. This article argues that the way managers think about the cost of improving environmental performance is poised for a similar shift. When approached in the right way, green, just as with quality, is free. Our findings are based on an extensive examination of Subaru Indiana Automotive's (SIA) pioneering 20-year environmental journey, on which it became a national green leader and learned how to make green improvement actually pay. The company has had a number of significant environmental firsts. For example, since 2004, it has been "zero-landfill." This means that SIA, whose 3,500 employees manufacture almost 1,000 automobiles per day, throws away less in a year than an average family of four does in a day. Astonishingly, SIA did not attain this extraordinary performance with massive investments in new technology, but by engaging its front-line workers in integrating green thinking into all of its processes and operations. Because they are the ones who handle the waste at the point where it is created, front-line workers see many green improvement opportunities that their managers don't. The thousands of small green improvement ideas they came up with year after year enabled the company to make green improvement truly profitable. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]