Information infrastructures for on-line measurement of non-productive greenhouse gas emissions in manufacturing: case of the brewing industry

Abstract

A novel information infrastructure designed to measure key components of the greenhouse gas emission ‘opportunity cost’ in a production environment is proposed. The data-driven metrics facilitate drill-down to provide visibility of constituent parts. Contemporary metrics typically focus on direct energy consumption and are often normalised against units of product produced. Such metrics have proven to be useful for monitoring trends in relative performance and for benchmarking against other plants. However, they typically do not provide visibility of energy consumption (carbon emissions) that did not directly contribute to the production of saleable product. With the community's ever increasing focus on sustainability and climate change, the environmental impact of industry has come under greater scrutiny. The proposed information infrastructure provides a new level of transparency enabling stakeholders to see the portion of utilities consumption (or greenhouse gas impact) that did not directly contribute to saleable product; the non-productive greenhouse gas emission impact in a manufacturing environment. A case study is included depicting results from a pilot implementation in a packaging line in a brewery.