Environmental problems are becoming more and more prevalent lately with on-going climate change. Although this news has been overshadowed by the latest novel coronavirus pandemic spreading all over the world locking down almost every country out there – some industries are utilizing these breathing windows to turn their operations towards renewable energy and conserve the nature as a whole.
Even though the initial cost is usually high, it has been proven that the long-term income is actually turning out to be increasing due to the fact that renewable energy generates far cheaper electricity. Let us discuss 5 industries that are using this time to upgrade their already existing infrastructure.
Manufacturing
The manufacturing industry is one of the largest consumers of energy. This is due to all of the machinery that they have installed in their factories and the heavy-duty cars that they utilize to move the products around. On average they need multiple drivers and motors to be running constantly, which ends up being around 70% of the overall power that they consume. The other 30% is divided into cooling and heating costs. The process of going green is going down by upgrading the already existing machinery as well as the creation of new ones that require less energy to consume.
China is one of the major manufacturers of goods and services, which are then distributed all across the world. This is done using huge tanker ships as well as trains, planes, and normal trucks. This is the reason why China is the biggest energy consumer in the whole world. The vice-president of Industry and Information Technologies in China, Su Bo, has issued a statement saying:
“Green and low-carbon growth will be the direction of the future development for the country’s high-end manufacturing sector.”
Financial Industry
Believe it or not, the financial industry is also one of the largest consumers of energy in the world. The growing awareness in this sector has resulted in an increase in laws and initiatives from the governments all across the world and in the United States of America in particular which promotes more and more environmental sustainability policies. This means that green filming is utilized in higher dosages during the production of films and other media.
It may also be surprising that Forex is the most ardent energy consumer among all of the financial markets. According to this BDSwiss review alone, it’s pretty clear to see that the markets are open 24/5 and are running on a smaller capacity during the weekends. This means that the operation and consumption of energy are constant and non-stop.
But according to 55Brokers, a media outlet in the financial industry, many companies are starting to devote parts of their monthly revenue to renewable energy, or green energy as some like to call it.
The huge corporations that are usually the ones consuming the most are now starting to establish their own source of energy through solar panel fields and various other modern methods.
General Business Industry
It may sound weird but all of those skyscrapers you see in major cities around the world like New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seul, and etc. are all filled with people who work day and night in the offices. AC cooling has become an industry standard. It goes without saying that Air Conditioning consumes a lot of energy. Apart from this, the offices are filled with different papers that are usually wasted away during printing and or utilized only once for someone to look at and then tossed into the bin.
This has caused all of these offices to start utilizing more environmentally friendly strategies. According to the New York Times, 81 percent of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) across the globe are working on transitioning their businesses into more eco-friendly environments. As time passes by the Information Technology (IT) industry is evolving and thus creating more comfortable ways to work for a lot of people in the offices. Personal computers, laptops, and smartphones have become an extension of humanity thus providing ways to minimize paper-based waste since all of the reports, emails, and bills can be sent over digitally. This means that utilizing files instead of printing out papers and then stashing them somewhere in a cold and dump room without it ever seeing the light of day is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Even government organizations like military, police, and federal institutions are turning their eyes towards sustainability as well. Not only is keeping the data digitally good for the overall nature but the ease of access also becomes a very important point. However, the feds and military have different problems associated with digitalization which is cyberattacks. However, that’s something they already pay a lot of attention to so transferring their paper-based research data into digitalized versions is not a huge problem.
IT and Big Data Industry
Computers have innovated the way of life for everyone across the world. This means that there are more computers thus more devices consuming energy. The issue is that even though the energy efficiency has increased so has the energy consumption in general since the devices became much more powerful. Server rooms for example are drawing huge amounts of energy. Apart from that, they also require air conditioning to keep everything cool as those rooms are small saunas and temperature is the enemy of any hardware.
The Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory has done a lot of research and has come to the conclusion that data centers account for 1.2% of the whole American electricity consumption. This number has increased by a huge margin since the year 2000. The industry started developing power supply standards to cut energy consumption. This is done via using direct currents instead of alternating ones thus cutting on cooling costs.
Energy Industry
Unfortunately, even to this day, most of the power plants use nonrenewable energy supplies to fuel their generators that create power. This means that the industry is taking something from the environment which it cannot give back. Thus, the industry started looking into more ways to generate electricity using renewable energy. This is where solar power and wind turbines have become more prevalent. Germany is a leading country in this field with their new and innovative ideas that are seeing more and more implementation. There are multiple companies like Solomon Corporation that offer services that recycle contaminated power-generation equipment into something more environmentally friendly.
Freight Industry
We all love online shopping. It is true that a lot of these services are offered by the companies situated off-shore somewhere in China or other industrialized countries. This means that all of the products need to be carried over to the United States. One of the most popular ways of transforming these products is via oceans using ships. The transportation, in general, is becoming expensive due to the sheer volume of items and the price of fuel (with the exception of…well…now since the fuel prices have dropped due to the coronavirus pandemic but this is when almost all of the movement across the world is paralyzed.)
Due to the ongoing concerns with fuel consumption a lot of these companies have been pouring finances into developing hybrid engines to reduce their consumption of fuel. This is in direct correlation to their environmentally friendly policies. The CNN report shows that Eugen Maersk container ships started running on low-sulfur fuel when they are docked in ports. This reduces the emission of toxic waste, sulfur dioxide, by a whopping 85%.
Conclusion
Almost all of the industries are looking for a way to go green. Some may have marketing purposes in mind since it has become trendy to support the earth, others, have realized the toll they are taking on the environment as a whole. One way or another, it is always beneficial for the world as a whole. More than usually everything is done by lowering energy consumption, increasing fuel efficiency, recycling, and so on. However, there’s still a lot to be done. Even more now, since the coronavirus has decreased overall movement across the world and reduced carbon emissions as well as shut down lots of factories that produce huge amounts of toxic waste.
