Meeting Your Sustainability Goals Through Automation

From fully autonomous micro-factories to delivery robots and sophisticated path planning systems, the automation sector has found multiple innovative ways to tackle sustainability challenges, reduce energy consumption, and lower emissions. Experts from Relocalize, Real Life Robotics, and ABB share their insights on this growing trend. 

Concepts like sustainable manufacturing and the circular economy may appear relatively new, but with governments and businesses focused on reducing waste and emissions in the years ahead, they simply cannot be avoided. 

In fact, there is a strong business case for adopting sustainability principles, including increasing operational efficiency by reducing costs and waste, building brand reputation and public trust, ensuring long-term viability, and responding to regulatory demands. 

Substantial strides are being made in circular manufacturing and sustainable packaging. Meanwhile, governments worldwide are pushing to cut urban emissions by restricting high-emission vehicles and promoting electric alternatives while also experimenting with delivery robots to support greener logistics.

Automation Reduces Waste

In key respects, sustainability concepts are not new to the automation sector. 

At its core, robotics has always been about sustainability, says Nicolas Durand, vice president and general manager, ABB, one of the world’s leading automation firms. 

“Everything we do in robotics is about sustainability. Sustainability is the opposite of waste, and this is how every robotics project is born. Aside from the actual product itself, we're looking at projects where we need to improve efficiency, we need to improve throughput, we need to improve safety — all elements of a good sustainability plan. Robotics has been working on sustainability since its inception,” says Durand. 

Sustainability and efficiency belong together, says Wayne McIntyre, president and CEO for Relocalize. 

“We lead with sustainability and efficiency together. We want to make sure we're doing something good for sustainability. And that’s true for our customers, too. On calls with customers, there is going to be someone who has sourcing and sustainability as part of their mandate. Sustainability is being brought to the forefront on a regular basis. And they're also asking for hard numbers and support. It can't just be a marketing claim. They want hard numbers, too,” says McIntyre.  

Economic Value of Sustainability

While customers are driven by sustainability concepts, they are also concerned about costs, he adds. 

“Most customers want sustainability, but ask ‘What's it going to cost?’ Ultimately, if you can deliver value for sustainability perspective — in our case, eliminating middle mile can have up to a 90% transportation carbon footprint reduction — that excites them. But what they also want to see is an efficiency gain and economic value that comes with it. The only way you can scale quickly and have a big impact is to do both,” explains McIntyre.  

Whether it be a municipality, a logistics provider, or businesses that are exploring automation, cost savings and efficiency are key to how people think about sustainability, says Cameron Waite, president Real Life Robotics, a Canadian firm that has developed an autonomous last mile delivery robot with powerful data-driven capabilities. 

“It's an economic advantage. Lower emissions and fuel optimized operations translate directly into cost savings. It's going to be different for each customer and how much that cost really is to their business,” says Waite.  

“There's a regulatory component, too. Cities and governments are pushing out for Net Zero targets. We know that's going to continue to happen, so, companies need to align with these new regulations on emissions, Smart City initiatives, and green transportation.” 

Sustainability also has an impact on brand perception and value, notes Waite. 

“If you're not seen as being somebody that has a focus on sustainability, that might be a negative to your brand. It is a competitive advantage and customers or consumers might prefer to do business with a brand that does have a sustainability program front and center in their business.” 

Cutting Out the “Middle Mile”

Let’s take a moment to look at the packaged ice industry. Estimated to be worth a cool $8.5 billion, this market is critically important, especially in the southern United States and in other warm climates around the world. But getting that ice from production facilities to distribution centers and retailers means a lot of avoidable “middle mile” emissions. 

Eliminating middle-mile logistics in this sector can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, water waste, and plastic pollution. And automation in the form of fully autonomous micro-factories can be a key enabler of hyper-local, climate friendly manufacturing. That’s the idea behind Relocalize — a company dedicated to hyper-localizing manufacturing through automation. 

“Relocalize makes products as close to the customer as possible in fully autonomous micro-factories. Ice is extremely heavy, expensive to ship, and is made of a material that we all have hyper-locally. Our system eliminates middle mile transportation and can produce ice on demand, right at the retailer distribution center,” explains McIntyre. 

For a project based in the hot and humid city of Jacksonville, Florida, Relocalize has developed an autonomous ice production micro-factory that fits inside a shipping container and is located right beside the distribution center. 

“It’s the world's first autonomous micro factory for the food and beverage industry. These factories do everything you see in a regular factory. You have ice making, you have packaging. You have package forming. You have palletizing. Anything that happens in a factory happens here. The only difference is there are no people inside it, unlike a typical factory and it's about 5% scale,” says McIntyre. 

It’s all part of Relocalize’s goal of helping to build a sustainable supply chain. “We want to completely rethink that supply chain and do away with all the trucks, whether they be electrified or otherwise. Electrifying the middle mile is critically important. It’s great if you can electrify vehicles and we can't get rid of all vehicles, but if we can get rid of vehicles in middle mile that's also an exciting approach,” he explains. 

Robot Refurbishment & Reduced Energy Consumption 

Robots fit well into concepts like the circular economy, says ABB’s Durand. 

“Today’s robots are probably going to be operating for 30-35 years because of how dependable they are. On top of that, almost 100% of robots used in the automotive industry get remanufactured and enjoy a second life. That's a pretty impressive stat, especially if you think about what that means from a sustainability standpoint,” says Durand. 

Remanufacturing robots reduces the carbon footprint by about 75%, according to Durand. 

“Every time that we get to remanufacture a robot and send a new robot out with a new lease on life, we're actually improving the carbon footprint. It's quite exciting and it is something that we're seeing more and more of,” explains Durand. Around 20% of robots even get a third life, he notes. “After they've been retooled and remanufactured once, they come back 10-15 years later, and we retool them and send back out for another 10 years.”

Roughly 70-75% of the carbon footprint of a typical large articulated robot comes from the use phase, not from manufacturing or end-of-life disposal. This is where driving the energy-efficiency of industrial robots becomes important. 

“Through energy efficiency cost reduction, we can enter this virtuous cycle where it makes sense for businesses to invest into energy reduction. Most of our customers have some sort of energy efficiency strategy. And it's quite interesting when we look at the improvements that we can get from a robot,” says Durand. 

With approximately 550,000 robots operating in the United States, reducing the energy consumption by 10% becomes significant. Towards that end, ABB has developed energy efficient robot controllers and robot arms. There have been significant moves on the software side too.  

“Using software, we are able to analyze and improve robot path planning. This not only provides better performance as far as the robot is concerned but provides a more energy efficient path too. We have customers with hundreds of robots. If they deploy path planning software, the impact is pretty significant.”  

Future of Sustainability in Automation

The focus on sustainability is set to grow more intense over the coming years and filter down to smaller companies, says ABB’s Durand. 

“We're going to see implementation of stronger governance practices within our customers. We’re probably going to see greater transparency coming through as a result. Ultimately, we need to ensure the long-term economic viability of our businesses. Sustainability is not going away. We're going to see more and more of it. And sustainability will no longer be something that is going to be reserved for the Fords and the Amazons of this world. It's going to come down to smaller companies and it's going to become an expectation,” Durand predicts.  

For more information on how automation can help companies meet their sustainability goals, and a quick peek inside an autonomous micro-factory, check out this free, A3 on-demand webinar.