From Guest Blogger Tom McShane: Going Green – And How Industrial Sectors Are (Or Should Be) Responding

According to BP, the world’s demand and usage for oil, coal and gas rose to all-time high levels of almost 50,000 TWh in 2012 – while hydroelectric power and ‘other renewable’ sources (including wind and solar) accounted for just 4,722 TWh last year.

While sustainable renewable resources are steadily rising, with a sharp rise in the last 5-10 years, and nuclear power usage has actually fallen, how are industrial sectors actually responding to this? This guest post, provided by eco-conscious PB Metal Finishing Systems, looks at the methods currently on the stead rise throughout industry to help curb usage of the ‘big three’ non-renewable sources.
Rainwater Water Harvesting, Treatment & Attenuation

When we’re talking large scale dealings with water, there are numerous (and quite significant) potential environmental impacts. There’s the over-reliance on mains supplies, the immediate disposal of potentially treatable water, the treatment techniques which are used, and the impact of large amounts of storm and rainwater run-off.

Looking at the first issue of mains reliance, numerous industries are turning to rainwater harvesting as an option to reduce this reliance and subsequently their costs; it’s no longer only good enough for a domestic gardener, it’s actually a sustainable solution for large scale industry. Agriculture is one such industry, and even untreated rainwater has its uses for spraying and cattle washdown.

Treatment of water is also incredibly important, and the technology is rapidly improving and becoming more affordable for industrial sectors to be able to do this. Packaged pumping stations combined with modern effluent treatment filters can tackle waste water use, whereas efficient UV filtering can filter out smaller particles using very specific waves of light.

Looking at bigger volumes of water, one the most significant environmental impacts that water can have is by potentially harmful waste water or runoff entering natural water supplies – and this is often true after floods or heavy rainfall, where easily contaminated water that has fallen or passed through industrial settings runs through the ground and into streams, rivers and other water sources. To combat this, stormwater attenuation can be used by industrial sites to both control the flow of water, as well as filter it before it enters water supplies.
Component Production & Finishing

The constant, almost round-the-clock running of industrial production machines represents an enormous draw on energy resources – whether it’s electric-powered factory machinery or gas-fired moulding or finishing solutions.

Let’s first look at the plastics industry, where’s there’s an enormous push for utilising recycled materials and for more energy efficient methods to tackle the reduction of a carbon footprint on all fronts. As of statistics from 2011, around 610,000 tonnes of plastics waste was recycled – and this just accounts for collected household waste, with figures from the last three years showing the best growth in plastics recycling in the last 10 years.

In the plastics industry, waste can often represent a big part of the cost the customer bears – if a method creates large amounts of waste that’s unable to be recycled, then it becomes a more expensive process for both the manufacturer and the buyer. That’s why there’s also a big emphasis on, not only recycling rates, but also on the efficiency of production methods, driven in part by consumer demands for as low prices as possible.

Using the plastics industry as an example, injection moulding is one of the more energy efficient production techniques as it only fills a mould with exactly the right amount of plastic required. In the metal industry, two of the biggest draws on energy are the heating, drying and finishing processes, and compressed air systems.

Heating and finishing systems generally comprise about 40% of the energy used in the UK metal industry. High temperature and low gas use methods, such as those used in the patented ‘spray save’ systems by PB Metal Finishing systems, can save up to 10% on energy according to the Carbon Trust.

So are large industrial sectors doing enough to help the green initiative? Well, they’re doing an awful lot, and the situation has improved massively in the last five to ten years with more efficient methods adopted, recycling rates increasing and renewable resources used more widely. There’s still some way to go, but if the current momentum is maintained then increasingly bigger and bigger differences can be made to the environment and to our energy resources.

This guest post was written by Tom McShane – blogger, green enthusiast and writer for UK-based PB Metal Finishing systems, who provide eco-friendly finishing processes for the industrial sector.