The aim of this article is to help you become greener. Even some of the big business leaders are leaning to it, like Bill Gates.
What Are the 10 Simple Steps That Every Manufacturer Can Take to Become More Green?
Sustainability will give you an advantage over other companies because you take care of the environment and save resources in the process. It will also help you stay up to date with customers’ values.
Switch To Renewable Electricity
Here we need to have insights into who the provider is, what percentage of renewable energy do we already have and what are our other options. The best bet would be to find a greener electricity provider or plan.
Establish A Green Team
Involving employees, companies can create a team whose purpose is to identify sustainability issues and how they can solve them. That will boost the company’s environmental and social efforts and also reduces costs.
Teams can have different goals that work towards sustainability, some implement recycling schemes, some may eliminate unnecessary packaging, while some are educating their colleagues of the importance of sustainability.
Start Recycling
The benefits of recycling are as follows:
- Your employees are most satisfied
- Reduces the cost by reducing garbage collection cost
By recycling you would be reducing the amount of waste sent to landfills which contribute to the company’s carbon footprint.
Encourage Virtual Meetings And Remote Work
When the pandemic hit, the amount of people who used public transportation dropped and so did carbon emissions globally. The pandemic has also shown us that some manufacturing processes can be done remotely while having real-time insights on the situation.
Eliminate Unnecessary Packaging
Since the zero-waste movement is on the rise, consumers are requesting that their packages are biodegradable, recyclable, or reusable. The non-essential packaging ingredients are viewed as unnecessary and excessive.
By eliminating packaging projects companies can reduce costs and save time.
Even small improvements bring benefits in huge material, time, and environmental aspects.
Watch Out For Snakes
What we mean by this is that you should inspect the machinery that uses compressed air for cleaning, power drills, etc. And it’s best to check for issues when the machine is turned off, because air leaks can reduce the performance and they can waste 30% of the energy.
Switch to LED lights & install motion sensors
Being efficient with do good for the environment. By implementing LED lights depending on the price of energy and bulbs you can save up to 80%.
If you were to implement motion sensors for the spaces where you leave the light on you can save 75% of energy if you use them in warehouses, up to 40% if you use them in corridors and finally storage rooms can add up to 65%.
Ensure Your Equipment Is In A Good Working Condition
While most companies operate at a range of 60%-80% efficiency, this means that there is a lot of space for improvement that help reduce costs and waste.
Optimize You HVAC
Due to environmental regulations and the increasing costs of energy companies have changed their attitude towards heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems.
The best way to go about it is to upgrade the existing HVAC systems. Just the replacement of one air conditioner can save up to 40% of energy.
Track The Quality Of Your Production Output
Manufacturers should focus on the product quality control if their goal is profitability and sustainability. The best first step is to track the quality in real-time.
The better the quality of the data and visualization the higher the attention that the operators will give to the certain process. The next step would be to find out why quality loses happen and introduce quality checks that discover non-conformities are discovered at the right time.
