Ie Magazine -the Next Industrial Revolution

innovation

by nabil nasr

The next industrial revolution Every stage of human history has contributed to the significant progress made in achieving today’s standard of living, but industrialization has been a major contributor to this progress. The most significant period in industrialization was in the late 18th century with the beginning of the industrial revolution. Industrialization brought profound societal impacts on cultural and socioeconomic conditions in industrialized nations. The key milestone was the introduction of the assembly line, pioneered by Henry Ford. Beginning in the 1960s, the application of computers and robotics helped usher in an era of cheap yet high-quality goods. Each advance has impacted the overall standard of living. Poverty, hunger, disease and conflict are still around, but a greater proportion of the world’s population lives a better life than it ever did before. This trend has been accompanied with a significant increase in consumption of goods and services. The downside of increased consumption is the severe impact it’s had on our world and its resources. Natural resources necessary for current industrial production are being used up faster than nature can replenish them. The level of production required to bring the rest of the world up to the standard of living of developed nations would demand far more resources than are available so the leading challenge to industrial enterprise in this century is to

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Industrial Engineer

find a sustainable, long-term solution to this dilemma. The journey to achieve this objective marks the beginning of yet another industrial revolution. The term sustainable production represents all activities associated with product conception, distribution, service, use and end-of-life management. Author Paul Hawken defines sustainability as an economic state where the demands placed upon the environment by people and commerce can be met without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations. Sustainable production means closing the loop on processes that generate waste, emit harmful pollution and demand more resources than the planet can provide. Not long ago, sustainable production was regarded as too expensive and non-competitive. That situation has changed. As the cost of resources climbs and governments mandate more and tougher environmental protection regulations, only sustainable industrial processes will be competitive in the long term. Attaining sustainable production demands new approaches and methods such as what is known as “eco-innovation.” Eco-innovation embraces products and processes that contribute to sustainable development via the application of knowledge to yield direct or indirect ecological improvements. The innovation needed calls for serious examination of many foundational theories and manufacturing methods. In the

Each advance has impacted the overall standard of living. first industrial revolution, we operated in an open-loop system. The resources then were abundant; energy use and waste were limited. Today, the fundamental challenge is to move to a closed-loop system that addresses the balance in our natural resources, energy consumption and waste generation. The U.S. Department of Commerce and the Europe-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is in the process of defining a set of unified metrics that manufacturers from any country can use to measure and benchmark their progress toward sustainable production. Stay tuned for updates. d Nabil Nasr is director of the Golisano Institute for Sustainability (GIS) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and director of the Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies, a technology development and transfer arm of GIS. He founded the National Center for Remanufacturing and Resource Recovery (NC3R) at RIT.