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Smart Factory Insights: Is Sustainability in Manufacturing a Benefit or Burden?

The electronics manufacturing industry has a choice when it comes to sustainability: Be led by incentive and motivation from customers who require it or be forced to comply by governments. If we act together now, we can address sustainability in a beneficial way for our businesses, rather than allowing it to become yet another burden. Let’s discover the global challenges and opportunities.

The way that the market and governments currently approach the challenge of sustainability is not too dissimilar: There are pockets of interest and incentives that appear in many different areas. To ensure sustainability, though, is taking a big step forward by creating projects and initiatives. There are hundreds of individual sustainability initiatives, each with a narrowly focused goal and intent, using proprietary point solutions, and developed case by case. Each project interprets the meaning of “sustainability” data differently, depending on its approach and purpose.

In theory, sustainability requirements should be quite simple. For example, one of today’s most heavily discussed topics is a company’s record of CO₂ emissions use in materials and products. The factors to consider are evolving as they increase in scope and complexity. Just one example would be the proportion of CO₂ emitted by a truck which is transporting the materials from the suppliers, in addition to the CO₂ emitted during the materials’ manufacture.

Each sustainability project, developed with such a narrow set of attributes, should create some form of sustainability passport that potentially includes:

• Information related to the reuse, repurpose, and recycling of information
• Details of materials and minerals used
• Their origin and transfer of responsibility through the supply network
• Quality assurance and provenance

While it is nice to see immediate results from current projects, many fundamental issues and challenges have arisen related to scalability, and ironically, sustainability. These include:

• Costs: Each project must develop its own IT infrastructure, perform the necessary software coding, and develop the required data models and data sharing mechanisms, often as customised add-ons to existing solutions.
• Ownership: Investors in each project may be companies that their peers or competitors may prefer to keep distanced, and which prevents wider adoption.
• Dependencies: Many companies prefer to avoid uncontrollable dependencies, such as a specific solution provider’s technology behind the project.
• Interoperability: Cost of ownership and operation escalate exponentially as data from different projects and initiatives need to be connected and translated, as required by the many instances of materials in the supply network.
• Compatibility: The data models within each project are likely not comparable, in terms of both the representation of data and measurement methods, resulting in unreliability and inconsistencies.
• Security: Projects typically require the mass sharing of data and new storage requirements that risk IP leakage—especially where third parties are involved—to translate data between projects and provide storage.
• Privacy: Data mandated for sharing may include access which should be held private to the company. This disincentivises expansion beyond the simplistic scope of an initial project.
• Greenwashing: The sheer complexity of methods of data representation and measurement across different projects lends itself to abuse.

The narrower the scope and scale of each individual project, the less important these points may seem to be. However, let’s fast-forward into the future, and consider the potential burden that this activity would represent if left unchecked. Take, for example, an e-mobility product, such as an electric car. Think about the complexity of the supply network, which consists of thousands of materials of different types, each coming through unique paths and processes. They have different origins, hierarchies of complex assemblies, and composite materials that include body parts, electronics modules, batteries, motors, and interior materials.

The methods and requirements for sustainability for each group of materials is likely to be very diverse. When you connect data from these disparate sources you will have a variety of solutions to consider. Combining data with its own measurement methods, terminologies, and methods of data encoding, then trying to extract and contextualize what’s useful, will require a case-by-case customization. The sheer IT resources needed to hierarchically “connect” all the potential data points and create a normalized set of reliable and consistent product information is immense.

Alternatively, there are steps the industry can take collectively toward creating an interoperable, global sustainable network (GSN). Let’s look at what would be required:

1. Create a common set of requirements.
Doing this for the scope and measurement methods for data collection, as well as standardization of terminology and representation of sustainability data, allows for consistency and interoperability. It allows for an open market where solutions from many different vendors work together by sharing, exchanging, and accumulating sustainability data in an automated and reliable way. This is done throughout the supply network with minimal cost of ownership. An essential element of GSN is to respect and preserve existing standards and methods that already apply to each sector or organization within the industry. Rather than replacing or forcing changes related to terminologies and formats, the GSN would feature an IIoT-based connector in which each source/consumer of data natively supports the GSN requirements. This is based on a local data format creation at the source using existing data.

2. Maintain the GSN definitions.
To avoid competitive resistance and high-risk dependency concerns, the GSN organization should be independent; it should not be under significant control or influence from any one company. Ideally, it should be a distributed organization comprised of entities from different backgrounds.

3. Carefully select raw data.
The technologies used by GSN for a sustainability information exchange must be selected such that the raw data created by each user or consumer does not need to be exposed or moved in volume, for example, to expensive cloud storage under the control of a third-party. The use of W3C Verifiable Credentials may be adopted to provide proofs and facts that are required for exchange of sustainability information without disclosure of the source data. In this way, all existing and future data, including private information and that related to IP, is not exposed and does not need to be changed from its current form. This represents a very significant cost and risk reduction as compared to other methods.

The result of creating GSN brings a very cost effective, low-risk, and low-investment solution for the provision of all forms of environmental and sustainability data, as well as provenance and security for materials and products. Commercial solutions will be created to suit individual needs, which would all be interoperable.

A key need for product sustainability is the accumulation and association of such data related to materials consumed during assembly. Material management and traceability functions within an MES are an essential element in any sustainability initiative. It’s essential to adapt existing traceability solutions that will provide material-to-product sustainability data association, as well as add information derived from the assembly operation itself. Solutions will differ depending on the nature and type of material or product, as well as the operation that is being performed. This may range from discrete assembly, harvesting and mixing, to storage and transportation.

The combination of defined measurement protocols, consistent data representation, and interoperability removes most opportunities for casual greenwashing, where excuses—such as lack of knowledge of protocols and methodologies—are removed. Any remaining greenwashing is very likely to receive detailed scrutiny. This makes enforcement easier and brings integrity to the data. Therefore, there is opportunity for the original intent to be satisfied, to wit, with measurable improvement when set against environmental targets.

The notion of a global sustainability network may seem like nonsense and a fantasy. However, the growing need for sustainability throughout the industry is a given. Remanufacturing and recycling are set to become at least as important as original product manufacturing itself and will require a secure information exchange and privacy. These costs must be bearable, and benefits should far outweigh the costs, to make sustainability, well, sustainable. I believe we will see some form of a GSN in the future. Our only choice is how we make that happen so that, rather than a burden, it is a benefit to society.

This column originally appeared in the June 2023 issue of SMT007 Magazine.