Careers in ICT-enabled sustainable manufacturing

With the race to achieve the carbon net-zero targets by 2030 gaining momentum across the global industrial ecosystem, sustainability has occupied the centre-stage today more than ever. Key Result Areas and Key Performance Indicators of organisations are tightly linked to good sustainability practices. Profits, people and planet, referred to as the triple bottom line, have become integral parts of overall business goals.

According to publicly available data, energy consumed in the manufacturing sector alone causes about 30% of 50 billion tonnes of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

A mere 8.6% of the 100 billion tonnes of resources used globally in the year 2020 were recycled. To keep the planet liveable and thriving, Global Circularity Gap Report – 2021 warns that recycling needs to be increased to 17%. Reducing energy consumption and minimising waste across the end-to-end manufacturing processes are the two key determinants for the journey towards sustainability.

This calls for designing energy-efficient and minimum waste-generating manufacturing infrastructure that enables reduced carbon emissions. In short, manufacturing needs to have built-in sustainability capabilities by design.

Combinational skills

The sustainable manufacturing domain is indeed seeing an increased demand for a talent pool that needs to have a combinational skillset of both industrial engineering and the new green industrial smart information and communication (ICT) technologies.

A representative set of key renewed mandates before industrial and manufacturing engineers can be summed up as follows:

• Designing energy-efficient work systems, installing less energy-intensive manufacturing machinery, and utilising renewable sources of energy.
• Leveraging a cloud-based IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) connected unified intelligence platform that helps in optimising the assembly and production processes, automating the workflows, streamlining the human efforts and alerting the timely preventive maintenance.
• Building carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) systems.
• Focusing on the reduction of waste generation by optimal utilization of raw materials.
• Enabling innovations in sustainable product, components and materials design and eco-friendly packaging through AI and ML-based simulations.
• Using blockchain technology to track and ensure the trustworthiness of vendors for their ethical and environmental practices in line with Sustainable Development Goals.
• Implementing processes to recover the waste, repair and reuse in the production processes (Circularity) by employing Robotics.

Emerging job roles

The sustainable manufacturing arena is seeing demand for lean manufacturing practitioners, specialists in the areas of Industrial Ecology and circular process design, renewable energy engineers, reverse logistics managers, sustainable product design specialists, vendor relation managers, waste recovery and recycling specialists, repurchase, repair and re-commerce managers, eco-friendly packaging specialists, Sustainability auditors et al.

With the global green technologies and sustainability market peaking at about $500 billion by 2030 (statista.com), career opportunities in ICT enabled sustainable manufacturing domain are set to witness sharp growth in the coming years.

(The authors are a sustainability evangelist and a student of Industrial Engineering respectively)