How Industrial Companies Can Embed Sustainability
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The industrial sector accounts for a large proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions. This critical sector – which includes chemicals, fossil fuels, cement, steel, and more – tend to include operations that are harder to abate because of high heat requirements or the types of materials and chemical reactions that go into producing the products.
A sizeable percentage of emissions also come from scope 3 emissions. These are carbon emissions that come from the use of the product and are not within the company’s direct control.
Here are three key ways that industrial companies can drive sustainability within their products and operations:
#1: Sourcing Sustainable Materials/Using Waste Materials
The Opportunity:
The materials that go into a product can account for a large proportion of a product’s overall environmental impact. It is easy to understand that materials and components that have higher carbon intensity to extract, transport, or create will result in a bigger overall carbon footprint.
Further, some materials will improve the circularity of the product (by increasing the recycling potential of the product, for instance).
Finally, by sourcing waste materials from one industry there is the potential for new symbiotic partnerships that may have both environmental and financial advantages.
The Challenges:
Tracking an item throughout the end-to-end supply chain is difficult at the best of times and recent supply chain challenges have compounded the problem.
The use sustainable materials may require important changes to product design because sustainable materials (such as recycled materials) may have different characteristics (e.g. strength, weight, elasticity, density, etc.) from existing components.
Some sustainable materials, such as recycled plastics and green steel, are already in short supply. As companies seek to use more of these materials in their production, they may get even harder to find and source.
Finally, if sustainable components and options are not available locally, the freight and transportation costs and emissions may outweigh their environmental benefits.
Industrial Example: Sun Chemical
One of Sun Chemical’s pigment production locations uses the waste stream from a nearby steel processing facility as a feedstock for manufacturing a new product. Specifically, the company takes spent pickle liquor (a waste product from the process of steel pickling, used to remove rust and other impurities from the surface of steel) and uses it as an input for their production of iron oxide pigments (used in cosmetics).
“Instead of having to landfill or otherwise treat this waste material, we can bring it in as a feedstock to produce a high-value product,” says Nikola Juhasz, Global Technical Director of Sustainability at Sun Chemical.
READ: Interview with Sun Chemicals: Industrial Decarbonization Requires an Ecosystem
#2: Changing Product Design
The Opportunity:
Changes to a product design that make the product more resource or energy efficient, longer lasting, or re-usable and recyclable, will reduce emissions and environmental impact across the whole of a product’s life span. Product design can account for up to 80% of a product’s lifetime emissions, according to McKinsey.
The Challenges:
Assessing the overall carbon and environmental impact of material can be difficult and often requires a complex set of trade offs.
For instance, the use of certain materials may make a product more efficient in the long run but may use more carbon intensive materials during the production phase. Electric Vehicles are a well-known example. Producing lithium-ion batteries for EVs requires more carbon-intensive materials than those that go into fossil-fuel combustion engines. But an EV will emit less over its lifecycle.
Design changes may also have a cost impact as sustainable design choices may be more expensive than traditional production models.
Industrial Example: Holcim
In the cement industry, around half the emissions come from calcification process where limestone and other materials are transformed through high heat into cement.
“We need to reduce the amount of cement we use in our concrete in order to reduce the carbon footprint,” says Olmo Lopez, director of Innovation and Ready-Mix Performance at Holcim.
He explains that if cement companies could focus on performance of their concrete to achieve a certain tensile strength, for instance, rather than “prescribed mixes” it would be able to reduce the carbon intensity
“We can use materials such as slag and fly ash to achieve this. The embodied carbon for slag, for instance, is approximately 150 kg per tonne of C02 (versus 1000 kg per tonne for cement),” he adds.
READ: Decarbonizing the Cement Industry
#3: Changing to Renewable or Lower Carbon Energy Sources
The Opportunity:
Energy use accounts for a large proportion of the emissions in industrial manufacturing processes. The majority of industrial GHG emissions come from burning fossil fuels for energy, according to America’s Environmental Production Agency (EPA).
Switching to renewable energy to drive industrial processes could reduce a large proportion of industrial emissions. Electrification of industrial processes and increasing energy efficiency, would similarly help to reduce overall sector emissions.
However, some industrial processes require the use of high heat furnaces, such as cement and steel, which make them harder to decarbonize. Technological pathways to enable this are still emerging but, in the meantime, these industries could in the meantime use lower carbon fuels (such as natural gas or hydrogen) to bridge the gap.
The Challenges:
Switching to lower cost or renewable energy sources can be a capital-intensive process requiring long time frames and changes to industrial processes. Technological pathways need to mature that would enable high heat processes to decarbonize.
Industrial Example: Pirelli Tire North America
Pirelli Tire North America, a leading manufacturer of high-performance tires, is committed to using 100% renewable energy at its production facilities by 2025.
“More than half of our electricity at a global level comes from renewable sources at the moment. At our manufacturing site in Rome, Georgia, we have partnered with a solar energy company to produce renewable energy on our property,” says Maureen Kline, Pirelli’s Vice President of Public Affairs and Sustainability North America.
READ: How Pirelli Tire North America is Driving Lower Emissions
