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Understanding Green Project Fundamentals • 45

with new technologies available the product that you are designing to use
four AAA batteries may be able to be designed using two AAA batter-
ies instead. This reduction of what appears to be only two batteries is of
course multiplied by the number of products you sell—so this could be
a reduction of thousands of batteries. And it makes your product more
attractive because it is less costly to maintain.
The third step then is to reuse. There is a distinct difference between
reuse and recycle. Reuse indicates that the component to be reused does
not have to have anything done to it. Recycling denotes that the compo-
nent needs to have something done to it before it can be reused. A good
example of reuse is in the computer industry. There are times when com-
ponents, like a motherboard, become useless. Rather than fix the moth-
erboard, it is sometimes more prudent to purchase a new computer. The
memory chips and in some cases the removable or hard disk drives remain
usable and can be ported to the new computer. The old computer is then
recycled, and some components are reused.
Within every product and process, there are ways to reduce NPO. It
becomes obvious that the more we redesign and reuse, the less NPO there
will be, thus the less we need to recycle. Project managers can lead the
reduction of NPO by including the planning for reducing NPO in their
up-front project management processes.

New-home construction consumes two-fifths of all the lumber and
plywood used in the United States each year. Two million tons of straw
are burned or buried each year by farmers, enough straw to build 5
million 2,000-square-foot homes.

the ProjeCt management
institute and greenality

To further the previous discussion, the authors are proposing some changes
to the fifth edition of A Guide to the Project Management Book of Knowledge
(PMBOK Guide). The fourth edition was released on December 31, 2008,
and it likely will be several years before the fifth edition is released. This is
the ideal time to get changes in. Those changes include a new subsidiary