I recently observed the following scenario: a home builder's hand-picked "lean team" watched the president of their big lumber supplier write 100,000 on a flip chart. "What's that?" the lumber supplier demanded. The group guessed dollars, to which the supplier shot back "Right! Now, tell me what it's for."

The team suggested man-hours, scrap, rework, overhead, cost of paperwork and cost of errors. While all good guesses, the response was, "$100,000 is the amount of money we spent last year on 35,000 gallons of diesel fuel burned up on wasted trips to your building sites!" He noted that he added nothing for lost time for the 700 extra fill-ups required, depreciation, cost of tires, oil changes and other administrative and overhead costs.

During the discussion that followed, my mind did double-duty as I calculated some implications of the president's announcement. I had just received a call from Kathleen Guidera of the Energy Efficient Building Association. She asked me to be the closing speaker at their annual conference. She wanted a topic that would pique the conference participants' interest and encourage them to stay to the bitter end. I did some more math.

Let's say there are only 100 companies who experience similar amounts of waste in only the top 100 U.S. housing markets. That's 10,000 sites. If each site wastes 35,000 gallons of diesel fuel a year, that's 350,000,000 gallons. That is a conservative figure, if you consider the hundreds of smaller suppliers in each market and the still-huge amount of building that goes on outside of the top 100. Now imagine the amount of hydrocarbons and particulate matter that results, not to mention what was generated in the shipping and refining of the fuel before it reached the local trucks. All waste.

Then it occurred to me: that is the hot topic. Green building is growing in this country, but still, most builders equate green with higher cost. In this housing market, that throws up a huge obstacle. Yet conferences, magazines and company reps tout the benefits of all the whiz-bang green products out there. For example, every single Dumpster on a project represents waste not just in the materials themselves, but in the manufacture and transportation of the materials to the site, and the removal of the scrap from the site. Every 12-foot, 4-inch long carpeted room represents waste in not taking best advantage of the standard 12-foot roll. Every room dimension not built on a 2-foot increment has major waste implications in lumber and trim. We recently worked with a builder to discover the company was burying eight to 10 yards of unnecessary concrete in every foundation, and that's what a single mixer holds. Just the wasted fuel for the excess material a single year calculates out to 10,000 gallons.

We teach builders how to build lean. As it turns out, we are also teaching them to build green. This is a win not only for the builders, suppliers and trades, but also for homeowner, the community and the environment. Silver bullets are rare, yet we are holding one right in our hands.

Improve your margins and help the environment? The green goes both to the environment and to your bottom line. Lean is green.