Sustainable Manufacturing Strategies Adopted by ConstructionEquipment Manufacturing Industries in India

Abstract

India is a developing country and is laying emphasis on the infrastructure growth and is focusing on development of telecommunications, airlines, airports, ports, highways, railways, housing, power, motor vehicles, banking, manufacturing and others. The impact of development is seen on the environment in the form of air pollution, greenhouse gases emission, water pollution, land pollution, noise pollution, waste generation and its management, depletion of natural resources, loss of biodiversity, loss of water bodies, deforestation, threat to animal life and so on. An approach to balance development, environment impact and wellbeing of society is the need. Sustainable development, along with sustainable manufacturing strategies and sustainable performance measures, is required to facilitate and monitor the infrastructure growth, manufacturing growth and use of goods and services to keep a balance between environment and growth. For the infrastructure development, construction equipment are widely used and hence it is important that their manufacturing and use should be sustainable. This paper focuses on the sustainable strategies adopted by earthmoving and construction equipment manufacturing industries in India which include prevention of pollution, clean technology, product stewardship, life cycle assessment and impact on the environment in the entire life cycle of the product. The paper concludes that the efforts in this direction are presently focused on reducing CO2 emissions, energy conservation and designing and manufacturing the products reducing impact on environment by making them more fuel, carbon and consumable efficient. The scope of this paper is limited to original equipment manufacturers of the earthmoving and construction equipment and does not cover the complete value chain in the life cycle of product. The methodology deployed included introduction to the topic, review of literature, formulating questionnaire and getting responses on questionnaire from the earthmoving and construction equipment manufacturing organisations and use of the statistical tool of Relative Importance Index (RII) for analysing the result. The goal of this paper is to identify the sustainable strategies adopted by these organisations and what aspects are currently being focused and what are the other focus areas. The same is adequately described in the result and discussion section. High importance is given to technologies reducing CO2 emissions, energy consumption and conservation and designing the product to be more fuel-, carbon- and consumable-efficient. Circular economy concepts, integrating the suppliers to reduce environmental impacts in value chain, and renewable energy use are in the initial phase and catching up.