How to get better at saving the planet: lessons from the factories
When talking about fighting climate changes, we often blame the corporates and their production lines for the massive carbon footprints. While that is true, there is something for us to learn from these manufactures: efficiency.
Efficiency might not appear in your book of strategies to fight against climate change, however, this is the core of our current solutions to environmental problems. The slogan ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ is in line with what the manufacturers are trying to achieve. So why not learn this from the masters?
These industries have mastered efficiency in order to cut costs and maximize profit for their large scale production. Terms like ‘fuel efficient’ in the automotive industry or ‘energy efficient’ in buildings and construction are become common nowadays. Even though these efficiencies can be profit-driven instead of efficiency-driven, there is a lot for us to take in and become more energy efficient in our daily lives.
Reduce: Yield loss
Yield loss can be simply understood as the waste of material. For our technical audience, here is the best definition of ‘yield’ in manufacturing I found on the Internet:
It refers to the percentage of non-defective items of all produced items, and is usually indicated by the ratio of the number of non-defective items against the number of manufactured items.
Obviously, the more products can be created from raw materials, the better it is. This mean the gold for production is to reduce as much waste materials as possible. To visualize this concept, we can look at the pastry sheet example.
In the first picture, we are looking at donuts made with the traditional cut from a circular mould. This is the most common way that we would see in most restaurants and home kitchens. However, there is a significant yield loss of pastries from the gaps between these donut rings.
Now compare the previous method to this hexagonal shape cut in a food production line. The is no doubt that the engineering team has done a fantastic job, in this case, to minimize the yield loss just by a slight change in the shape.
We might argue that wasted pastries can be composted or used for different purposes. In response to this, every material has its own unique afterlife. Non-compostable materials such as metal are very expensive to produce raw and even more costly to repurpose or recycle. Not to mention energy resources like electricity can be even more difficult to salvage. As much as we love our renewable energy, only 26.2% of global electricity comes from renewable sources like wind, solar or hydro. So when it comes to consuming, less is more.
Reuse: Exergy
You read it right! It is ‘exergy’ we are talking about here, not energy. Here is a short and simple definition of ‘exergy’ according to Exergy Economics:
The maximum useful work which can be extracted from a system as it reversibly comes into equilibrium with its environment.
When referring to manufacturing, exergy is often known as the amount of energy that can be reused in the manufacturing process. A common way for manufactures to optimize exergy is to reuse the heat from the heating/boiling process. Many metals we used for mass production have high melting points, which require a lot of energy generated to reach the desired temperature. Stainless steel, for example, have a melting point of 1510 degree Celsius. Because the manufacturers have to pay a big electric bill to get the stainless steel pot boiling, they would not waste any materials or energy if possible. That’s why they have found a way to capture exhaust heat and reuse them to speed up the heating process, which can be seen in the Sankey chart below.
Now let’s simplify this with a daily life analogy: boiling water. Imagine boiling water in a pot on the stovetop with and without a lid. Of course, we should all know that keeping a lid on while boiling makes the process much faster. In fact, by using the lid, we can to capture and recirculate the heat to help with the boiling process. And even without noticing, a simple thing like putting on the lid can increase efficiency and save energy at the same time.
Recycle: Upgradability
Recycling has come a long way in terms of technology and popularity. A lot of products have changed its design to become recyclable. However, recyclable products are far from recycling centres. There are many factors to consider when designing a product for recycling, as I talked about in my previous story.
Even though many products today are taking recycling into consideration, most of them still lack in upgradability. Companies are putting out updated versions and product lines every year to keep the sales department happy. This trend can be easily observed in the tech world where new products are frequently released with unique and attractive technology, which means more and more products are discarded every year. These products will be recycled in parts for the production of new versions, however, the unfortunate ones will likely turn into e-wastes that require a special recycling process to avoid exposure to toxic materials like mercury.
All these expensive processes can be reduced significantly if the products have better upgradability. With upgradability, consumers now only need to buy new features or parts instead of a brand new product. One brilliant example of this is the design of electric toothbrushes. Most electric toothbrushes come in with two main components: the handle and the replaceable toothbrush heads. The design team has considered that consumers will replace with different toothbrush heads every few months and use this knowledge to provide better user experience.
Unfortunately, not all products are upgradable, and the design should also take this idea into consideration. For instance, aluminum can be recycled indefinitely if uncontaminated. By knowing with, aluminum should only be used in recyclable products. If we look at the Sankey chart below, we can see the most common applications of aluminum are in transportation and construction, which has long lifetime use such as cars or buildings.
And to make the lifespan of aluminum even better, we should avoid the applications that will contaminate the materials, aluminum foil in particular. Unlike drinks or food cans which can be rinsed after, aluminum foil is often used in cooking or baking where the foil will become unable to recycle. Luckily, other options are already available in the market to replace aluminum foil such as biodegradable parchment paper or reusable baking mat.
What we learned in this article is that we need to engineer and design our life to be more efficient. It is not just about work or productivity efficiency, we also need to be more efficient about our material and energy consuming. The good news is you can probably do both these things at the same time while saving our planet.
