Towards lean for sustainability: Understanding the interrelationships between lean and sustainability from a systems thinking perspective

Over the last years, there has been growing pressure on businesses to manage their operations responsibly in regards to their environmental and societal impacts. This has motivated companies and researchers to identify ways to implementing sustainable operations. Studying the relationships between lean and sustainability appears to be a tangible way to answer the question of how to integrate and, therefore, jointly deploy these two initiatives. Notwithstanding that the investigation of lean and sustainability interrelationships has been perhaps one of the most recently researched topics, the majority of the research efforts do not adequately frame their analysis on the triple-bottom-line aspects of sustainability. The limited perspective of previous studies leaves us with a fragmented understanding of the synergies between lean and sustainability, a prerequisite for developing integration approaches. This work expands previous literature reviews by analyzing lean and sustainability under a systems thinking lens, more specifically by using distinctions, systems, relations, and perspectives theory. To sharpen our understanding, we identify and analyze the interrelationships between lean and sustainability and their impact on performance from the operational, financial, societal, and environmental viewpoints. From our review, we identified a set of building blocks for developing a lean-for-sustainability integration framework with the intention of promoting the discussion on how companies can embed sustainability into their operations.