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Conceptual Understanding: Clean technology is found in a broad range of industries, including water, energy, manufacturing, advanced materials and transportation.
Conceptual Understanding: As our Earth’s resources are slowly depleted, demand for energy worldwide should be on every designer’s mind when generating products, systems and services.
Conceptual Understanding: The convergence of environmental, technological, economic and social factors will produce more energy-efficient technologies that will be less reliant on obsolete, polluting technologies.
Restricting manufacture and travel means less emissions
Maps show drastic drop in global air pollution after coronavirus quarantine
Drivers for cleaning up manufacturing: To reduce pollution, waste and the high amount of non-renewable resources manufacturers need to consider the following reasons for cleaning up manufacturing include:
Promoting positive impacts/enhancing image which can appeal to customers/increase sales
Ensuring neutral impact or minimizing impacts through conserving natural resources by recycling waste/promoting the recovery of waste from the ocean
Reducing pollution/use of energy which can help the manufacturer meet government targets/legislation
Reducing wastage of energy/resources which can increase profits by lowering production costs
Legislation is a driving force for industry to clean up manufacturing processes.
current or forthcoming legislation (laws)
to conform with government legislation
to avoid penalties
Pressure created by the local community and media
communities have made it known that they don’t want harmful (to humans, ecology and the environment) industries
pressure groups such as Greenpeace or even a small community town
this can sometimes force legislation to be developed and enacted
International legislation: Laws considered as the driving force for industry to clean up manufacturing processes.
The Kyoto Protocol 1997: An international treaty that sets binding obligations on industrialised countries to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The treaty was agreed in 1997 and came into force in 2005 to reduce emissions including support for renewable energy, improving energy efficiency, and reducing deforestation.
What is the Paris Agreement?
End-of-pipe technologies: Technology that is used to reduce pollutants and waste at the end of a process.
Sometimes it is also called an end-of-pipe approach and usually expensive. In most cases they only become effective when damage (e.g. occurrence of problem materials) has already occurred.
End of pipe emissions include exhaust gases, wastewater, noise and pollutants and other polluting substances which have already occurred or arisen, or to render them controllable or disposable.
A more meaningful, and usually less expensive, approach is to consider the potential to reduce the environmental impact of a product when it is being developed in order to avoid such impacts from the outset; in this way the reactive methods become of limited value.
Incremental and radical solutions for End of Pipe
As we have discussed above, end of pipe technology is used to reduce pollutants and waste at the end of the industry's manufacturing/production processes and this can entail the treatment of water, air, noise, solid or toxic wastes.
There is the option for a manufacturer to consider either an incremental or radical solutions.
Incremental solutions
Products which are improved and developed over time leading to new versions and generations.
This incremental development of a manufacturing process can require major refits and the addition of new elements to a manufacturing process.
Which allows a company to plan strategically how it will make the changes which allows for better budget control but requires long term planning. The impact is not as drastic as radical solutions.
Advantages for Manufacturers:
Use of existing trusted technologies
No/limited downtime in production (continued profits)
Exploit existing technologies
Do not need to invest in large changes to processes, technology, personnel or approaches.
Respond to some aspects of legislation quickly and efficiently
Improvement to competitiveness
Predictable development with low levels of uncertainty
Disadvantages for Manufacturers:
Take too long as small changes may not meet the legislation requirements
Need to make small changes on a more frequent basis. Sometimes the small changes required do not fulfill the criteria of legislation
Crowded mature marketplace with many competitors and low potential for market growth
Examples include:
filters installed on the end of industrial smoke stacks
Carbon Capture Composting
Catalytic Converters on smoke emission.
Radical solutions
Where a completely new product is devised by going back to the roots of a problem and thinking about a solution in a different way.
Radical solutions can make a huge and sudden impact as they often require the replacement of a whole system which can be costly and time consuming where a company maybe in down time.
Advantages for Manufacturers:
Exploration of new technologies
High potential for market growth and
Creation of new industries
Fewer competitors
Benefit from patenting new solutions
Benefit from improved reputation
Sometimes radical approaches are needed to respond to drastic legislation
Disadvantages for Manufacturers:
costly (both if technology outfitting and loss of profits during down time) high uncertainty of success, possibility of high market resistance, development unpredictable incorporating specific starts and stops
Radical solutions sometimes require expensive and timely R + D
High uncertainty of success
High investment in personnel, training, technologies or new equipment
Untried methods are not risk-free
Examples include:
System level solutions: Solutions that are implemented to deal with the prevention of pollutants as a whole rather than just components (such as just End of Pipe). It looks at all stages of the production system wide and often involves radical implementation.
Factories throughout the world that want to help stop pollution have two basic options: working to control existing pollution and trying to prevent future pollution. In many countries, factories are obligated to abide by certain environmental laws; others must implement their own self-imposed methods to stop pollution.
Usually, their goals are to minimize the damage done by existing pollutants and to attempt to prevent further pollution by modifying their industrial practices. A related option is to sell specific by-products as raw materials to other industries.
Air pollution usually takes the form of smoke or smog, but sometimes the pollutants are invisible to the naked eye. Contaminants can include particles in the air, as well as solid and liquid aerosols; other common air pollutants include sulfur oxides, hydrocarbons, and carbon monoxide, which are produced by industrial activities such as burning coal.
To help stop pollution, a factory can modify its procedures or use different equipment. For example, filters on smokestacks can help stop pollution by catching harmful substances and cleaning fumes before they reach the air. In addition, a factory might reduce carbon monoxide emissions, for instance, by burning natural gas instead of oil or coal.
This can help policymakers and energy planners understand the impacts of existing and proposed legislation, policy, and plans on renewable energy development and deployment at the local, state, regional, and national levels.
Favourable tax concessions may be offered to those industries that integrate pollution controls into the process, reducing waste as opposed to only having end-of-pipe technologies that only deal with pollutants at the end of a process.
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