I was watching a program tonight that discussed how philanthropy and businesses can work together without ‘pinkwashing’ or ‘greenwashing’ (aligning with a good cause even when the company itself is naughty).

However, sometimes a company doesn’t need to take on an outside cause to be a better company – they just have to investigate their processes and make them better.

One way is by reducing corporate waste – the so-called ‘lean manufacturing’ method is like this, and involves looking for ways not to waste in manufacturing, all while still providing value to the consumer.

And the good news: lean manufacturing works for everyone!

Unlike a corporate connection to a charity, there is no downside to lean manufacturing processes. For example, shareholders might be annoyed at a 10% investment by a company in a charity, since that’s 10% that doesn’t flow to their dividends; but a 10% reduction in manufacturing costs both comes back to them AND helps the environment.

It’s this latter part that makes the most sense. Build a car with less steel waste, and you spend less for the raw materials, and can (hopefully) pass on the savings in part to consumers.

And as we know, environmentally, any manufactured item incurs on extra resources: water for cooling steel or cleaning it, for example, as well as coal for refining and petrochemicals for transportation. All of this is impacted positively when a manufacturing process uses less material and produces less waste. Think it’s minor? Consider this: if a design used 10% less steel, that’s 10% reduction from every phase: smelting, refining, transportation, and manufacturing. So that ‘small’ 10% is repeated again and again and again, saving costs every step of the way.

Of course, I’m focusing on materials here, but lean manufacturing also refers to other aspects. For example, when air bags came out, cars could get (somewhat) lighter, since the safety of the air bags meant cars didn’t need to be heavy cages of steel for protection (I say ‘somewhat’ because of course they couldn’t get too light!) This small decrease in weight of course reduced some costs, but more importantly, it reduced weight without reducing safety and security. Not only that, but the reduced weight also meant that the final owner had less car mass to drive around, and so could get improved gas mileage – all again without safety concerns.

If I seem to be focused on cars, it’s because they make an easy example – save 10 pounds of metal on a car and everyone wins (except maybe the refineries). For other types of manufacturing, it’s perhaps less obvious, since they may be able to only shave ounces instead of pounds, or minutes instead of hours in manufacturing. For example, in one company I was in, changing the line for the next product consumed an hour or two, time when the whole staff had nothing to do. That cost money, so working on speedier changeovers led to more efficient working, and more product in the same time. This is another example of lean manufacturing – reducing waste, even in labor.

However, it’s the saving of materials that most interests me. After all, reducing waste reduces consumption; and reducing consumption is a ‘green’ cause just about everyone can get behind. So the next time you look at manufacturing, I hope you look at it a bit differently; try envisioning the clean (I mean ‘lean’) manufacturing possibilities…

First off, an explanation of the title: me and the missus are going ‘raw food’ for August. Completely – at least, with the exception of roasted coffee beans, which I don’t count, since we don’t eat them, just pour a little water over them and drink the ‘juice’!

This is not the first time, since last summer we went for about 2 months or so. However, it’s different in 2011: now we are 100%, including no 7-11 drinks, no ‘small’ bags of roasted nuts, etc.

So, really getting into this, we asked ourselves what we could do for a treat. In the past, I’ve searched for raw food restaurants, and could only look somewhat enviously at the listings over in Vancouver.

So imagine my surprise when I typed ‘raw food victoria bc’ (gotta add the bc or it’ll give me aussie results), and not only found a great restaurant – but one that had been around since 2008!

Cafe Bliss is a small place just west of Town Hall – 556 Pandora to be exact. Not only did we drop by immediately, but we spent far more than we expected to. For example, they had a brownie that was the absolute best chocolate brownie I have ever had – still can’t believe it was raw. Add to that their raw version of a Naniamo bar, which while not the same buttery taste to the filling, replaced it with a more cherry tang (but quite good, nonetheless). Needless to say, we plan to frequent the place, and are delighted it’s established – although it would have been nice to find it earlier!

The morale (if there is one)? Customers are looking for you. For a restaurant, that’s local customers – and immediate sales. Add a few common search phrases to your site (in the text, or the “meta” description tag in your HTML), and you’re making it much easier to find you, and get business.

As I received some extremely low-priced items from eBay today, I was reminded of how low costs can go. And from there, I wondered where is the limit?

In software, it’s pretty straightforward: costs can go to zero, since the actual product has no physical cost. True, programmers cost, but the physical product is zero, or at least it can be.

But with real world products, zero isn’t possible. Make a transistor, and something is used up – so it costs more for 1,000 than it does for 10 (unlike software). But as we’ve seen in China, costs can go very, very low – my eBay purchases were a fraction of what similar things cost over here (which ironically were likely originating from China as well).

And while perhaps competition can drive a price low, even then there is a limit, a physical limit to how low an item can go without losing money.

Add to that the money you need to run the business and pay the wages, then it’s obvious that even software can never go completely to zero (at least, as a charging business).

But how low can prices go?

Ultimately, you can only sell an item long-term if you make a profit, no matter how many that may be (joke: I lost $2 on every item I sold; Q: how did you stay in business? A: volume). And as you trim the fat from the profit by sending jobs offshore, etc., etc., there comes a time when you reach a lower limit – continue at this profit level, and you can’t live.

What that limit is varies for every product of course – but the implication is that in the future, with enough competition, every business will work at ‘just enough’ levels – something we’re seeing today with fierce competition.

Of course, some companies know how to manage this, by factoring in patents, barriers to entry, and so forth, so not everyone will be charging only ‘just enough’ to get by. But for those with competition (and there are many today in this economy), I wonder how low prices can go…