Securing Your Sustainability

Jim Montague is the Executive Editor at Control, Control Design and Industrial Networking magazines. Jim has spent the last 13 years as an editor and brings a wealth of automation and controls knowledge to the position. For the past eight years, Jim worked at Reed Business Information as News Editor for Control Engineering magazine. Jim has a BA in English from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and lives in Skokie, Illinois.Designing and assembling greener process applications, running more sustainable facilities and producing greener products requires participants to adopt some better practices—so it's not too much different than researching any new parameter or capability that end users might need and specify. Though each process and application has its individual requirements, here are some basic ways to go green that can be used across different processes.

• Evaluate existing processes and facilities and measure what energy, raw materials, water, compressed air and other resources they're consuming.
• Employ utilization data to begin developing a plan for conserving resources. This plan might include powering down or turning off equipment when it's not being used, and replacing simple induction motors and drives with higher-efficiency and/or variable-speed motors and drives or servo drives that can more closely match production needs with energy used. Also, check if your process application or facility could use regeneration technology, which typically uses a shared power source and linked drives to capture power from decelerating components to help accelerate others.
• Conduct tests or trial runs of sustainable devices and applications to confirm savings generated, identify adjustments and find new green opportunities. 
• Reexamine applications and process designs to see if you can simplify them by eliminating or combining some components or sections. This will reduce material needed to build equipment and lessen items requiring repairs in the future.
• Inventory all the raw materials that your process applications are consuming and/or processing into products and seek ways to reduce waste, perhaps by running closer to tolerances or recycling materials.
• Investigate whether more sustainable alternative materials could be sourced and determine what design changes they might require in your equipment and processes.
• Collaborate with end users on adapting or developing greener end products and redesign applicable processes and systems to meet those new requirements.