Greenovation: orchestrate your sustainable future
We are all facing probably the most intractable sustainability challenges impacting the planet and organisations, both big and small. And as a leading technology company, we recognise our role and responsibility to play a part in managing and resolving these pressures.
As part of our Business to Planet philosophy, we have developed a portfolio of services, designed to navigate the hurdles and at the same time, build in innovation and sustainable performance at scale. As engineers we run to the use of technology in contributing to sustainability goals. Think about generative design for creating lighter housing and less waste material or a reengineered power input for factory where hydrogen is used in stead of natural gas drastically reducing emissions.
Our sustainability framework first helps to define and commit becoming a more sustainable organisation through new thinking, and even new business models. We then help to act on these plans with dedicated solutions for building in sustainability into products, redefining operations and supporting technology. Finally, it is critical to report and manage ESG data, to meet the increasing demands of stakeholders, customers, employees and regulatory bodies and also to measure your impact on the bottom line and on the planet.
The word Greenovation has innovation in it. This does not necessarily mean to start from scratch when dealing with sustainability challenges. Better yet, re-design, re-use, re-purpose are focussing on reducing effort, materials and focus on more efficient processes of product design and maintenance. As with any engineering processes, greenovation starts with a design (for sustainability) and looks at reengineering of existing products, production lines or production processes. Finally the migration to sustainable technology needs to take place. Sometimes a radical shift to a new product but it can also be a gradual change.
For manufacturers, there is increased pressure — from consumers, shareholders, regulators — to create products that generate less CO2 emissions, use less water and energy, and keep waste generation to a minimum. We use our engineering expertise to redesign and configure your products — whether vehicles, airplanes, or packaged food and drink — focusing on sustainable materials, cost constraints, and reusability.
Organisations that focus on sustainable product design not only stand to gain from improved compliance, reduced emissions, and reduced resource scarcity concerns, but can also reap benefits such as increased revenue growth and improved relationships with customers and employees. Unfortunately, sustainability is yet to be at the core of product design processes at most organisations. Organisations cite a variety of hurdles that they perceive as obstacles to revamping their product design processes. With design for sustainability we can help them orchestrate their sustainable roadmap.
With design for sustainability we play a strength of all our engineering competences.
It contains a set of solutions that is to be applied during the complete product developments considering the complete product life cycle, it helps our clients to reduce their environmental impact and balance this with traditional KPIs like performance or quality, cost and time.
We address 3 main client challenges:
- It is hard to frame and measure sustainability. We have specific questionnaires to frame the sustainability and we also integrate LCA and circularity analysis within the engineering process
- During complex systems design siloed thinking, or getting stuck in engineering disciplines is one of the pitfalls. Systems engineering breaks these silos. We have formalised models & methods to explore sustainable design alternatives from ideation to build. On top of that we developed a value engineering approach.
- You need to ensure that the data secure and reliable. All engineering is done digitally through data and models. We design and deploy the digital infrastructure and wherever applicable we also automate all repetitive engineering tasks.
So design for sustainability really transforms the engineering organisation of our clients, and helps ours client to adapt to the new sustainability goals.
Scope 3 emissions represent a large percentage of a manufacturer’s emissions, emanating from right across the supply chain — from design and procurement to distribution. Involving activities in and outside a company’s control, they are hard to track and report. We help clients meet this complex challenge through reengineering supply chains, lifecycle assessments, energy efficiency and smart data collection.
Greenovation is our word for reengineering. Engineering and sustainability go hand in hand in this context. Whether it be redesigning energy facilities to use hydrogen or re-use materials with additive manufacturing, they are all greenovating technologies.
Organisations worldwide are implementing new energy models, based around electrification, alternative energy sources such as green hydrogen and biofuels, hydrogen for thermal engines, renewable energies for electrolysis, other technologies than electrolysis such as biomass thermolysis, and transportation of hydrogen via pipelines, trailers, decentralised energy, and platforms that enable peer-to-peer energy sharing.
In reengineering, Hydrogen will play an essential role. It is an energy-dense fuel that could replace oil and gas as an energy source, especially in hard-to-electrify transport and industrial processes. But obstacles must be surmounted to reach these ambitious goals and reap their benefits. Much of the supply chain is still being developed since green hydrogen is still very much in its infancy. Efficiency, deterioration, durability, resilience, density, and electrical power capacity are all issues that need to be addressed for the industry to be successful.
Hydrogen will be important in order to increase the amount of renewables in the grid (like solar and wind) and also to decarbonise some sectors like the steel industry. One of our goals at Capgemini is to help our clients across the hydrogen value chain in order to scale up and implement hydrogen technology by using our knowledge and development tools.
Reengineering or re-use with additive manufacturing
The integration of additive manufacturing (AM) in industrial operations leads to increased circularity and optimal resource utilisation.
Metal components deemed as non-re-workable or too expensive to repair with specialised technology and personnel, can be brought back to their original geometries and initial or even enhanced mechanical characteristics, within hours, instead of days, using AM.
The technology is already applied to repair components from the aerospace, automotive, naval and tooling industries, with reports of up to 60% energy savings, up to 70% resource consumption reduction and up to 90% raw material savings!
In our approach, we aim to evaluate the damaged components, perform a feasibility study and impact analysis of the cost and lead time savings with additive repair. The feasibility check is followed by the workflow definition, including acceptance criteria and testing methods for quality evaluation, completed with the connection to the most suitable supplier for the physical repair execution. Re-use additive manufacturing is a complete solution to increase efficiency in the manufacturing operations.
Migrating to sustainable technology
Often overlooked, we know that sustainable IT needs to be designed and planned for, and implemented, to reduce the environmental impact of IT operations across an organisation. We help our clients evaluate the purchase, use, management and disposal of IT devices and equipment, champion sustainability through employee engagement and move towards a greater take up of environmentally sustainable technologies.
Be ready to be the architect and orchestrator of your sustainable future! Whether it be sustainable product design, sustainable mobility, sustainable energy engineering or sustainable aerospace, the design, reengineering and migration steps are followed. In each of their specific areas the steps will be filled in with domain specific details. They all have their specific targets, rules and guidelines but what they have in common is:
The need to Greennovate!
A lot of questions come in on the use of AI in respect to sustainability. We think that the AI potential is there to contribute to a lot of sustainability goals. However, AI is seen as something that comes ‘for free’. Free of costs but most of all free of the impact on the environment. That is why we believe there are six actions that are critical to leverage AI’s full climate action potential:
- Account for, and take measures to combat, the negative impact of AI on the climate.
- Educate sustainability teams on how AI can make a real difference and educate AI teams on the criticality of climate change.
- Lay down the technological foundations for AI-powered climate change action.
- Scale use cases on the basis of impact for your sector and emissions intensity of particular functions.
- Collaborate with the climate action ecosystem.
- Harness AI to bring greater focus in reducing scope 3 emissions.
