Making Industrial Maintenance Sustainable

Industrial sustainability is increasingly important as we move away from harmful environmental impacts and towards renewable energy. Maintenance is ripe for these improvements since it regularly consumes and discards parts and industrial fluids. This guide will outline benefits, examples, and implementation of sustainable maintenance that can help your business reduce waste and reduce downtime while keeping your machinery running smoothly.

Sustainable maintenance means improvements in finances, compliance, and reputation. Green maintenance is in essence an effort to reduce waste, something all businesses value.

Businesses increasingly recognise the merits of pursuing ESG-minded goals. Identifying your operations’ environmental impact and adopting industrial sustainability improves your reputation and helps your business find its place in the environmentally conscious future.

Sustainable maintenance means fewer parts packaging and filters sent to landfill, using biodegradable products, embracing reusable materials, and improving equipment energy efficiency. All this gives you peace of mind that your business is doing its part to help the world.

Maintenance practices with negative environmental impacts often also present health and safety hazards. This can include:

• Cleaners and other industrial chemicals being flammable or emitting hazardous fumes
• Noxious fumes from inefficiently burning fuels
• Overly frequent exposure to machinery hazards due to excessive maintenance schedules

A green maintenance plan can make your equipment service safer for your workers and more pleasant to perform. A healthier and safer workplace can also improve your business’ reputation and reduce turnover.

Along with meeting ESG goals, sustainable maintenance offers direct business cost savings. A strong CMMS and predictive maintenance plan avoids excessive maintenance sessions and ensures your equipment operates better for longer. This means reducing:

• Consumable spare parts used, such as filters
• Lubricants and cleaners used
• Maintenance shutdowns, letting you reduce downtime
• Maintenance labour costs
• Equipment energy consumption, due to greater energy efficiency and cleaner fuels
• Costly equipment replacement, due to giving machines the care they need when they need it

Any sustainable maintenance plan will need to keep several factors in line with UK environmental regulations. These cover areas such as:

• Emissions: From industrial machinery engines, building HVAC systems, etc
• Storing hazardous substances: Any cleaners or lubricants considered to be hazardous must be stored safely and with adequate ventilation and spill protection measures in place
• Health and safety: Use of industrial chemical products must mitigate hazards such as flammability, corrosivity, or fumes
• Water: Any runoff into the sewage system must be approved as not unacceptably polluting
• Waste management: Used parts, parts packaging, filters, and fluid containers must be sorted into their appropriate disposal containers, including recycling ones for reusable materials
• Waste storage: Hazardous waste must be stored in proper, secure containers and disposed of by authorised individuals or businesses

Any maintenance plan built around meeting or exceeding these environmental regulations will naturally fall into sustainable maintenance.

Moving towards green maintenance practices may be a challenge. It will take upfront costs and planning, team commitment, and ongoing monitoring. However, the benefits and merits are well worth it.

A Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS) can go a long way in achieving sustainable maintenance. A CMMS tracks your equipment’s maintenance as well as your inventory. These systems monitor equipment operations and use predictive maintenance to determine when they need to be shut down for service. This lets you reduce downtime and maintenance costs and improve energy efficiency by keeping equipment running smoothly.

A CMMS can also manage your spare parts inventory: how much to stock, when to order more, and when machines will need it. That can lower the environmental impact of stock deliveries and parts packaging, along with reducing the business costs of inventory.

Improving maintenance plans often involves lots of upfront documentation of current operations, and a green maintenance plan in turn will need an assessment of the waste your maintenance currently produces. A CMMS can assist with much of this, but manual recording may also be required.

For each machine, log the following over time:

• Parts such as filters charged to its maintenance
• Fluids charged to its maintenance, including their container sizes
• Frequency of maintenance
• Downtime, and the energy consumed restarting from rest
• Labour charged to maintenance
• Shop supplies consumed, such as disposable gloves

Any system of improvement requires ongoing tracking of measurable, quantifiable goals. With your maintenance waste points identified, establish methods of tracking each one against clearly established goals for reduction. Involve your quality assurance programme to ensure you’re using the best possible methods of recording continual improvement. Cross-reference this data against the dates when you introduced sustainable maintenance measures to get an idea of how well you’re improving your environmental impact. This will reveal which directives are working well and which areas still need improvement.

Adopting sustainable maintenance will take commitment from your whole maintenance team. Ensure you train all maintenance staff in the importance and benefits of green maintenance and how their efforts will determine the programme’s success. Explain which of their tasks will change and encourage them to think about the environmental impact of all their day-to-day work.

Training also has to cover analysing the system’s effectiveness. Your CMMS, and even AI, may paint a solid picture of your maintenance efforts, but you’ll still need trained technical staff to assess trends and adjust the maintenance plan accordingly.

If certain tasks are seen as a burden then use encouraging signage and ongoing training to affirm the importance of these measures. Work green maintenance into the company culture so everyone commits to industrial sustainability.

RS can assist with condition monitoring, inventory solutions, and many other areas essential to sustainable maintenance.