How do small changes enable the shift to net‑zero? a techno‑environmental‑economic analysis

Abstract

With many of the world’s governments committing to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by mid-century, with well-defined milestones along the road, it is important to investigate how each sector can contribute towards achieving this global goal. The manufacturing sector, with its energy-intensive processes, large amounts of wastes, and hazardous and harmful emissions, is one of the main contributors to global GHG emissions, as well as other sustainability aspects, and, thus, it has great potential to contribute substantially to achieve net-zero objectives. This paper presents a techno-environmental-economic analysis of technologies that can play a key, enabling and leading role in the quest towards net-zero. Such technologies typically bring modest improvement in the environmental performance; however, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate how such small changes, when implemented in an industrial setting, can contribute significantly to the collective improvement in the environmental performance. In order to put the potential improvements into perspective, a real case study from the UK aerospace manufacturing sector is conducted. In the case study, metrics measuring potential improvements from the installation of a low-to-medium waste heat recovery system, and the upgrade of electric motors in the shopfloor to more energy efficient ones, are calculated through environmental and economic models. The models are then subject to a series of sensitivity analyses experiments to help understand the impact of different sources of uncertainty on the perceived GHG emissions, and economic and energy savings. The techno-environmental-economic analysis results revealed that these small changes, when implemented in an industrial setting, can indeed bring valuable improvements in the environmental performance of a manufacturing institute. Further, the sensitivity analysis experiments demonstrated how the environmental and economic performances are not adversely affected by different levels of fluctuations in key, likely to fluctuate, input parameters.