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Greener lubricants to decarbonise heavy industry
CategoriesSustainable News

Greener lubricants to decarbonise heavy industry

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: As renewable energy infrastructure expands, so do the maintenance requirements. And, similarly, the growth of e-commerce requires ever-faster production and distribution networks. Facilitating that growth are new machines, including robots, capable of technical tasks older ones are not. As materials technology develops, heavy machinery is increasingly smart, connected, and made from more environmentally healthy components.  

A crucial aspect of many industrial machines is the lubricant that allows the pieces to move at incredibly high speeds and temperatures. When contaminants get in the oil, machines can fail, jeopardising worker safety and causing production costs to skyrocket. Dutch industrial lubricant manufacturer Fluitec provides new-generation lubricants and management systems. The company’s lubricants are designed to withstand the new workloads of cutting-edge machinery, and the management systems provide laboratory-level quality analysis on the plant floor as well as in the field. 

Fluitec’s Fill4Life programme is a circular method of improving the life span of a lubricant while reducing a company’s carbon emissions. Rather than the linear model of adding new oil to a machine and then disposing of the old, Fill4Life uses Fluitec’s turbine oil and healthier, greener additives to significantly prolong the life of a machine and the lubricant that allows it to run. Fill4Life is customisable and can reduce every machine’s CO2 footprint by 85 per cent and save a company at least 50 per cent of its previous expenditure on oils.  

Fluitec also provides the Ruler V Antioxidant Monitoring solution to analyse and predict the longevity of the lubricants currently in a machine. The monitor works in full sunlight and includes dictation capability and a camera for fast, accurate reports from the field. And with a small Membrane Patch Colorimetry (MPC) test, Fluitec provides a visual inspection of a lubricant’s health in under two seconds. The system stores the data for trend analysis and pre-emptive maintenance to help reduce machine failure.  

Fluitec is a carbon-negative company and claims to be the only one of its kind to attain B Corp certification.  

From electricity-powered paving vehicles to industrial waste materials replacing cement, innovations in Springwise’s library are working to help decarbonise heavy industry as quickly as possible.

Written By: Keely Khoury

Reference

How can AI help real estate professionals decarbonise?
CategoriesSustainable News

How can AI help real estate professionals decarbonise?

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: The UN Environment Programme reports that “Nearly 40 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions come from the real estate sector. Of these emissions, approximately 70 per cent are produced by building operations, while the remaining 30 per cent comes from construction.” While the climate impact of buildings is clear, for managers of large portfolios of commercial real estate, it can be difficult to build a complete and accurate picture of the sustainability of every building. 

Enter Cambio, a commercial real estate decarbonisation platform built by and for real estate professionals. The startup brings together climate and data scientists and retrofit and regulatory experts to provide portfolio and building managers with deep insight into building and equipment performance. 

Armed with an understanding of the sustainability changes that could make the quickest and largest reductions to a building’s emissions, portfolio managers can ensure compliance with regulations and drive progress towards net-zero goals. Cambio’s system integrates directly with every metre on a property, providing a livestream of energy use and emissions intensity.  

Additionally, the system works seamlessly with utility providers’ APIs, making it possible for portfolios of mixed ownership to monitor all properties in the same way. The platform uses artificial intelligence to analyse potential returns on investment for a range of retrofitting options, before ranking the properties based on the level of opportunity for carbon reductions.

As well as flagging compliance with regulatory policies, Cambio also automates reporting. This makes it possible for owners and managers of large portfolios to see total emissions at-a-glance, as well as those for individual buildings. They can then track interventions over time to evaluate their efficacy.  

The complexity of real estate decarbonisation management is reflected in the numbers of AI-powered solutions being created by innovators. Springwise’s archive includes projects that use blockchain to track buildings’ carbon emissions and AI recommended carbon transition plans.  

Written By: Keely Khoury

  

Reference

AI helps to decarbonise energy-intensive businesses 
CategoriesSustainable News

AI helps to decarbonise energy-intensive businesses 

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Together, heavy industry and transportation produce 40.4 per cent of the world’s annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Each sector has its own particular challenges in reducing pollution, and every manufacturing plant has its own individual machinery and processes. That complexity makes it challenging for businesses in sectors like steel, cement, telecoms, and automotive to identify ways to reduce emissions, implement changes, and track progress against company goals. 

Using a deep understanding of those conditions, a team of industrial engineers worked together to create QiO Technologies to transform the ability of heavy industry to achieve carbon neutrality. Based on artificial intelligence (AI) analyses, the Foresight Sustainability Suite improves production efficiency, tracks the performance of every machine, and provides service and maintenance support. 

QiO provides the three different parts of the Sustainability Suite separately or together, allowing businesses to focus on the areas they most want to improve. Foresight Optima maximises production efficiency. Foresight Maintenance tracks and predicts machine failures to help reduce operating downtime, and Foresight Service helps businesses better plan the timing and order of fixes and upgrades. 

QiO’s latest product, Foresight Optima DC+, is specifically for data centres – themselves a significant contributor to global GHG emissions. With a recently closed series B round of funding that raised $10 million (around €9.4 million), QiO Technologies plans to focus its expansion into this area of work.  

Manufacturing and chemical production process improvements are reducing pollution in several different ways. Springwise has spotted a new way of recycling plastic and hazardous chemical waste, and a new wood-fibre building material that produces almost zero waste.

Written By: Keely Khoury

Reference