Top Trends in the Future of Sustainable Manufacturing

From new sources of energy to slick, streamlined production, many of these developments already promise to revolutionize the sector.

At the forefront is the shift towards a “circular economy”, an approach that aims to design out waste and pollution, regenerate natural systems and keep materials and products in use rather than taking for granted that they’ll end up on the scrapheap.

Industrial biotechnology plays an increasingly promising role here. Under a bio-based manufacturing system, plastics are essentially fermented from plant-based sources rather than formed from oil feedstock.

Soybean oil can be converted to graphene. Water bottles are already being created using carbon-based plastic. Tomorrow’s biorefineries will harvest products from sugar and straw to manure and organic waste to create vastly more sustainable types of plastic without the need for petrochemicals.

Meanwhile, nanotechnology and 3D Printing is increasingly embedded in the process trains used by manufacturing facilities, allowing them to “print on demand” the parts they need, cheaply and quickly. This keeps material usage to a minimum while cutting out delays and transportation costs.

It’s not just these numbers that are factored in. Thanks to leaps and bounds in IoT-enabled technology, modern manufacturing machinery is capable of collecting stacks and stacks of data for every minute it’s turned on.

Clever companies are finding ways to transform all this data into useful, practical insights that reduce waste, trim fuel use and streamline overall operations, making them more sustainable in the long run. This also creates opportunities to remotely monitor equipment, ensuring it’s at peak performance, round the clock.

As well as this information powering more data-driven manufacturing in-house, the future of manufacturing will see better knowledge sharing and collaboration between teams, departments and even companies. More and more organizations are making their most sustainable, efficient discoveries freely available through open-source patents or even software.

The skinny? Today’s manufacturing facilities are discovering new, exciting ways to improve efficiency and effectiveness with fewer resources while producing less waste. Not only that, they’re starting to share these insights and best practices with others in their field, propelling the rate of positive change. The future of sustainable manufacturing looks rosy indeed!

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