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Welcome to Industrial Sustainability Today

Industrial Sustainability Today’s mission is to support the manufacturing leaders putting sustainability at the heart of their digital transformation strategy.

Every issue, we share the latest insights our community need to inform their company’s journey to net zero.

We’d love you to join our audience of 40,000 who are already benefiting from regular updates, including:

Latest R&D news
Must-read case studies
Exclusive access to Omdia analysis
Round up of regulatory updates
Wrap up of latest product innovation news
Much more

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The success of global climate action hinges on the manufacturing sector substantially reducing its environmental footprint. Consider the following statistics:

A third of the 35 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions globally were generated from manufacturing and construction activities in 2020
Only 8.5% of the 240.2 quadrillion BTUs of industrial energy consumption is from renewable sources
Half of all pollution in the US is from industrial sources

Many bold commitments and pledges have been made by manufacturers, with target dates set for decades in the future.

This is all well and good, but if the industry is serious about reducing its impact on the global climate, then their activities need to start bearing fruit today.

This is why we’ve launched Industrial Sustainability Today. To provide companies with insights that will help accelerate the green transition, across the manufacturing lifecycle.

We will champion how new approaches to technology, processes and operations are being implemented by market-leaders, whilst providing research-backed insights to help manufacturers deliver on their decarbonization strategy.

We hope this will be a source of information and inspiration as you make these critical choices.

Setting a sustainable target

You may think, with the impact manufacturing has on global emissions, all companies would have clearly laid out multiple commitments and pledges, right? You’d be wrong and that’s just for Fortune 500 companies! This is before even considering the publishing of clear metrics on their current performance against these targets. Alongside this there is significant variance in what targets are used and when they’ve been set for.

Just in April

Intel committed that its global operations would become net-zero by 2040,
New Balance announced it would use 100% renewable electricity across its operations by 2025 and reduce GHG emissions by 50% by 2030.
Mercedes pledged to halve its carbon footprint per passenger car, whilst by 2030 70% of its energy for production will be from renewable sources.

The graphic below highlights the timelines for the pledges (or lack thereof) for three of the most common climate change initiatives. This is supplemented by this infographic showing the commitments made by each of the top 50 manufacturing companies, by industry sector.

However, just because a company has nearer term targets doesn’t mean that it’s “more sustainable,” and vice versa.

And, to some degree, the existence of a pledge does not provide any cast-iron indication of an company’s sustainability credentials.

The magnitude of challenges varies across industries, companies and even sites. So even a delayed release or long-term-horizon pledge can be far more meaningful than arbitrarily selected dates, produced solely for the purpose of appeasing stakeholders. And this is especially true when these delayed pledges have been scientifically derived with clear and measurable milestones.