The role of environmentally friendly IT solutions in industrial processes
The effects of human activity on nature and the environment are becoming increasingly important. On an almost daily basis, people are facing media news of industrial accidents with negative consequences for the environment. It all began with the industrial revolution. As factories and industries started popping up in the 19th century, they left a visible imprint on the environment around them. With no law in place to stop them, the pollution including air, water and land has been growing for almost 220 years resulting in smog in many developed regions around the world.
Not only now, but also in the past, history shows that citizens were ready to fight against unsustainable environmental usage. The first formal environmentalist group formed in 1889 and was called “The Society for the Protection of Birds”. Then, gradually naturalists were creating new associations giving an opportunity to say loudly that there were people who were seriously caring about the environment. Still, it was about as far as environmentalism (political, ideological and ecological movement) went for most people. As a result, in December 1952, air pollution got so bad that Great Smog of London killed 12,000 people and more than 100,000 were made ill by the smog’s effects on the human respiratory tract (a high pressure weather system caused a temperature inversion, in which a layer of warm air high above the surface trapped the stagnant, cold air at ground level). Most of the thick fog came from burning coal. Currently, this problem can be noticed close to main urban agglomerations with high population density and many single households around using fossil energy sources for heating. Consequently, the concern over the tragedy happened that time led to the Clean Air Act of 1956 passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
The movement for environmental activism took off in the 1970s. Although, 1970 brought the of Jimi Hendrix, a rock musician and songwriter and also the end of the death Vietnam War (1975), April 22 is a date celebrated around the world as Earth Day. The idea for a national day to focus on the environment came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, a US Senator. Inspired by the students who were resistance against war movements, he realized that he could make an effort to inspire people to oppose air and water pollution. Senator Nelson announced his idea and finally built a national staff of 85 to promote an event across the country. On April 22, 1970 almost 20 million Americans took to the streets demonstrating for a healthy and sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies.
Much like 1970, Earth Day comes at a time of big challenge for the environmental communities, companies and single people. Today, more than a billion people every year celebrate Earth Day reaching into its status as the largest observance in the world before Earth Hour (April 30; millions of people turn off their lights for Earth Hour at 8.30pm in their local time). Apart from this, not only single people do a lot to interact with the environment, but also business which is spending more and more money on innovative projects and initiatives focusing on environmental protecting matters.
In many cases, businesses still see environmental regulations as newly imposed costs on operations. However the corporate sustainability and social responsibility movement is getting more and more supporters. Activists, the media, customers, shareholders or even Generation Y employees are getting good at pressuring companies to take responsibility for environmental impacts. In fact, business is stepping up and becoming a participant in solving environmental problems. As the impact of climate change is increasingly felt, the environmental part of CSR (corporate social responsibility) is becoming increasingly important. With each day that passes, it’s clearer that reducing CO2 is no longer enough to save the planet: people have to go much further. Service companies as well as factories are trying to respond to this challenge racing each other how to make the economy carbon neutral.
Increasingly, the idea is to help build a carbon-free economy and factory capable of eliminating more carbon dioxide than is emitted. One of the ways how to do this, is to use advanced technological solutions including software and hardware products. Many companies are already engaging with technology to a lesser or greater degree. Many manufacturers are moving to a model where they have greater control over their product’s lifecycle.
History
A role of business in society is to provide services and products that can help people improve their lives, while continually using fewer resources and respecting the environment. One of many possible ways to achieve it is to use advanced information technology solutions. The emerging growth of IoT (Internet of Things), services offered through the Internet and facilities, GIS systems and the information that gets transferred through satellites around the planet have generated a higher influence of the updated information on a few aspects of the environment as well as human health. When people start looking for the variety of software apps available on the market, they come across a number of them that were created for human health and environment studies. They are even quite user — friendly and certainly can help a learner to understand better the respective subject with ease.
Apart from this, there are numerous apps or huge IT platforms supporting the industrial processes. With the availability of resources on every aspect, from a single machine to a group of sensors around a factory, IT technologies are supporting the business wherever a process can be optimized from economic and environmental sides. Compared with the previous several decades, humans have a much better understanding of how their activities affect the environment. The vast majority of obvious environmental challenges are caused by practices such as dumping trash and other waste material in open pits. Information technologies are unique not just because of their growing use in decision-making and knowledge management systems but also because they can make significant improvements in the efficiency of energy and materials used in factories. Industrial ecosystem strategy is an important component of making human action sustainable. As the planet’s resources are obviously finite, an economic system on long-term growth driven by those resources (defined as an unlimited factor) is doomed.
The basic feedback after this paper is to explore the implications of information technologies for sustainable development. The issue of sustainable development is at the crux of society setting the future direction of humanity on the planet. The technological change — more and more powerful computers, new satellite monitoring systems or even artificial intelligence and others — will not change drastically the world. The issue of sustainable development will remain essentially the same or similar in the high tech future of tomorrow. The development of information systems, communications technologies as well as the emergence of digital factories of the future will create a new economic model. It will have potential for making major contributions towards the sustainability of the Earth. Innovations of information technology offer new substitutes for the transportation and production of goods and a major shift towards less resource-intensive production, trade and services offered by business. Today’s information and technological society is being built on technology, intelligence and knowledge. Information technology empowers both machines and people with data which is transformed into an additional value and knowledge (knowledge management systems).
In industrial ecology, systems of production and consumption are considered as one. Therefore, solutions to environmental issues need to consider how the production and consumption of goods operate as a unit and interact with a large scale environment. To be successful, industrial ecology has to adapt and incorporate technologies from any area (from agriculture to banking) that is found useful. Neither traditional environmental adjustment or pollution control technologies nor green technologies alone are sufficient if the ecological concerns are to be effectively mitigated. Technology can make possible improvements within quality and inventory control systems and help to reduce or eliminate defects or substandard products which do not meet quality requirements. It should be mentioned that this is not a result of the technology itself but of the management systems (Six Sigma for instance) associated with technology. Continuous improvement methodologies which are mainly based on the feedback received from users or customers, now can adopt information technology additionally to what they have now. In this case, technology can help to manage or capture the information from systems which has been lost so far and unused by anyone.
One of the examples of industrial ecology is in Kalundborg, Denmark. A city with a popluation of 17,000 located in the north of the biggest Danish island called Zealandia, has an eco-industrial park, in which companies from the region collaborate to use each other’s byproducts and share resources. Several factories are linked, sharing waste, heat and materials. They are keeping operation costs low and additionally minimize their activities on the local environment. The Kalunborg industrial park is the first full realization of industrial symbiosis. Industrial ecology in this case is a concept that is picking up a new industrial style called circular economy where companies are focused on closing a product’s lifecycle removing waste from the entire process. While the terminology and the policy emphasis on circular economy are relatively new, its practices are well established within industries. Currently, industrial processes are agile, fast developing and quick to exploit the market opportunities presented by digital services available from almost every place in the world. The opportunities for deploying circular economy thinking are underexploited. The methodology is clearly desirable from an environmental point of view.
It is evident that reuse and better design can significantly reduce the material bill and the expense of waste disposal and can create new enterprises and more useful products and services. According to this, new technologies have a great place for developing as well as demonstrating better economic perspectives for different categories and products. In contrast to non-biodegradable products, factories are looking for new automation and IT-based solutions which improve the efficiency of business. Pairing the digital transformation with circular economy principles can indeed transform the economy’s relationship to materials and finite resources, thus unlocking additional value and generating positive outputs.
The immediate objectives of industry initiated environmental programs are mainly to reduce emissions, waste and energy consumption while being economically efficient. However evaluating the environmental effectiveness of such programs is relatively difficult. Despite many successes published by companies involved in industrial ecology initiatives, the effectiveness of industry is difficult to address independently because of the lack of information regarding the resulting environmental effects. Technologies offered by IT corporations can deliver and solve business challenges supplying software programs which can fully predict potential future effects both economic and environmental. As a result, without good data and well defined metrics, the forecasts cannot deliver good predictions. Eco production is an additional factor which plays a special role in industrial ecology. As a new field, industrial eco production is a cluster of concepts, tools and applications which is going to reorganize companies and the way the world produces goods. Additionally, it can generate conceptual insights and practical knowledge that will determine the success of a company in the future as more and more customers will be making purchasing choices based on environmental effects of their decisions.
Summary
The field of information technology has been increasing rapidly with new opportunities that are opening along with an active role in the field of production planning, execution and giving positive results for the environment. Information technology has tremendous potential in the field of environmental education, health and economy including industrial sectors. To explore how the role of IT in different industries is changing, digital technology should be mentioned. It is increasingly transforming all sectors of the global economy, seeing into every part of the business and escalating as a corporate priority for the next years. Each change, both small and large, creates a new demand for technology expertise, leadership and new innovative IT solutions.
The most powerful systems that offer the greatest rewards are enterprise wide systems that have knowledge and information modules targeted to all business goals. One of the most important aspects of companies operations is an ability to provide high value services offered within CSR (corporate social responsibility) policy. Many corporations emphasize the attractiveness of combining environmental protection efforts to achieve savings. Of course, these systems have emerged in the marketplace many years ago but now they are promising completely integrated data and sophisticated modern systems recognized as environmental friendly.
IT technology can give an opportunity to access up-to-date information, optimize the material usage and deploy rigorous quality processes where all kinds of pollution would be minimize or eliminated in some parts of a business process. One of the biggest barriers which stops deploying new advanced IT technologies are investment capital and lack of significant benefits of implementing solutions friendly for the environment. The financial ability of a company to initiate voluntary environmental programs is a factor in whether such programs are undertaken. Small companies have limited resources, finances, personnel and technical abilities and therefore might choose not to expend resources on additional technological solutions if the benefits are not readily discernable.
Digital technologies can also improve circular economy approaches where the main goal is the wise and effective use of both primary and secondary resources. The circular design strategies for closing a product’s loop involve responsibility for life cycle solutions and product ecosystem understanding. The circular economy reaches beyond the traditional considerations of material efficiency, recycling or reuse of side streams. IT solutions can make the positive development of business mapping processes involving automation and robotics technologies. A digital platform can enable rapid development of innovative products and services in a collaborative industry. Manufacturers can bring together suppliers, customers, shareholders and other relevant parties to design products relying on the general feedback and technical requirements received from business partners. During the design process, machine learning tools and IT technologies can predict the environmental performance and impact of a new product, forecasting its carbon footprint (CO2) along the entire lifecycle.
Even though there is a progress in technology, there are still many issues related to technologies used in different industries. During the transformation journey, companies typically face several barriers — internal and external. The main internal issue is connected with the behavior of organizations to enable cross functional collaboration and customer centricity. The external barriers are related to required partnerships to leverage the full circular potential of value chains as well as related to different funding requirements, risk and return structures of circular business.
Digital tools can be the catalyst for optimizing manufacturing and business processes across an enterprise to gear up for circular economy and environmental friendly industrial production. With machine learning tools and artificial intelligence solutions, we can predict new product quality in the manufacturing process while minimizing waste and energy consumption. Overall the market in Europe, the US or elsewhere, digital technologies figure to play a key role in helping manufacturers develop low-carbon innovation products based on the circular economy approaches. The companies setting the new models for operating with focus, agility and visibility through becoming environmental friendly and intelligent enterprises are predestined to gain a first mover advantage in addressing the new economic model and helping the world to become a safer, greener and cleaner place for living.
Written by Lukasz Kudlak
