It's not easy being green, but it can be productive.

• Position: Furniture industry; environmental regulation - Interview with Prof. Robert Klassen - Interview

Robert Klassen earned his Ph.D. in business from UNC Chapel Hill in 1995. For his doctorate, he visited furniture plants in North Carolina and southern Virginia and surveyed manufacturers to determine the impact of environmental regulation or concerns on performance. He teaches operations management as an associate professor at the University of Western Ontario.

BNC: What environmental issues have hit furniture makers?

They've faced pressure over the emissions from finishing operations. And they're worried about how the Clean Air Act of 1990 is implemented. They are concerned they would be forced into very high-cost solutions that could make a number of plants close.

BNC: Are there additional worries for makers of wood furniture?

There's a fair bit of restriction on logging and growing pressure to take more and more wood supply off the market and preserve it. So the cost of materials rises. They also have to deal with all the waste that's generated. A lot of them will simply burn some of the material, the sawdust, if that's possible. Others will sell it to a particle-board manufacturer.

BNC: What do you mean by adaptive and conventional - the two kinds of changes that plants make?

Adaptive changes are fundamental changes. So in the furniture industry, a water-based finish would be an adaptive change from a chemical-heavy organic finish. A conventional change leaves the manufacturing process the same, such as adding a fume-capture system on a smoke stack.

BNC: Did it matter how much they spent?

There is little correlation between how much was spent and performance. You can either spend a lot of money efficiently or inefficiently - but 90% reported changes that cost more than $5,000. The high range could run to several hundred thousand dollars.

BNC: But companies that changed their production system instead of just cleaning up problems saved money in the long run?

They were trying to eliminate excess waste, materials that weren't being used to improve the product itself. So they were able to drive some cost out of the system.

BNC: Why was quality hurt when plants changed how they made furniture?

The example people in the industry routinely cite is the water-based finish. It tends to be harder to fix if there's any damage down the line. And the...