Sustainability boosts innovation in technology

Everyone’s talking about sustainability and energy-efficiency. But in this context, production must not be regarded in isolation. Sustainability, in the sense of “using a regenerable system so that it is preserved in terms of its essential characteristics” (Wikipedia), has to focus on the entire value creation chain. The EMO Hannover 2013 will show how sustainable production, from raw materials to recycling, secures global competitiveness.

In the forestry sector, it has been accepted for centuries that you must not fell more trees than will actually regrow. This natural principle of sustainability is inexorably being adopted in modern-day production technology, and is fittingly reflected in the motto of the EMO Hannover 2013, “Intelligence in Production”. Because “for more and more manufacturing companies, ecological efficiency is the obvious complement to economic efficiency”, concurs Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christoph Herrmann, an executive board member of the Institute for Machine Tools and Production Technology (IWF) at Brunswick University of Applied Science.

“But changes towards sustainable production”, says Herrmann, “are possible only if the product’s entire life-cycle, from raw material procurement, part manufacture and assembly, actual use, all the way through to final disposal, is taken into due account.” Without this perspective, “potentials can easily be overlooked, or worse, problems merely relocated from one phase in the life-cycle to another.” Because when we’re talking about the entire value creation chain, “we have to think in terms of beginning-to-end, or complete product and material life-cycles”, explains Professor Herrmann, who at the IWF heads the Product und Life-Cycle Management Department, and as a sideline is also the Academic Executive Director and a member of the board at Lower Saxony’s Vehicle Technology Research Centre (NFF).

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