As our industrial sectors, public spaces, and world are increasingly focused on environmental accountability, this has resulted in a shift in the focus of reliability and asset management professionals.
Traditionally, reliability practitioners have focused on maximizing operational uptime and throughput capacity, minimizing costs, mitigating risks, and ensuring that safety standards are met. Modern reliability practitioners and asset managers are now being asked to expand their focus to include sustainability.
Reliability is no longer just about uptime – it’s about building resilient, sustainable assets that deliver value over their entire lifespan.
Sustainability in asset management isn’t limited to a focus on environmental friendliness. It’s about extending asset performance over its lifespan to minimize energy consumption, lower emissions, and increase long-term business resilience, while continuing to add value through a balance between cost, risk, and performance. This requires reliability practitioners to understand and integrate sustainability principles into asset strategies.
A Shift Towards Sustainable Asset Management
Across all industry sectors, there is a growing focus on sustainability targets. These targets may be driven by regulatory demands, such as ISO 14001, stakeholder expectations, our organizational environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments, or other local factors.
As a result, we are increasingly adjusting asset lifecycle models to incorporate not only traditional factors, such as technical performance and cost efficiency, but also the environmental impacts of energy usage and emissions, from project conception to reclamation.
This shift to include sustainability can have a significant impact on decision-making. If we are making a reliability decision or recommendation on ‘run-repair-replace’, we now consider factors such as carbon footprint, energy efficiency, and ease of reclamation more explicitly. This broader focus on adding sustainability adds complexity to decision-making, but also increases opportunities for optimization.
Lifespan Extension: A Greener Investment
The most sustainable asset is typically the one that you don’t have to replace. If we can extend the useful life of a critical asset through better equipment maintenance practices, improved asset health monitoring, and predictive analytics, not only can we save the capital cost of replacement, but we can also reduce the environmental costs associated with manufacturing and transporting new replacement assets and recycling the old ones.
For example, suppose we can utilize predictive analytics and condition monitoring to monitor the health of motors driving rotating equipment, such as pumps, in a production plant. In that case, we can detect and address problems before they escalate.
This early and timely maintenance intervention can reduce the costs of reactive repairs, including lost production impacts, increase the mean time between replacement, and allow for repair or replacement of components vs replacement and recycling of the entire pump-motor assembly, etc.
Equipment asset strategies designed with long-term impacts and environmental considerations are better overall for our total cost of ownership (TCO) and meeting our sustainability objectives.
Reliability practitioners are well-positioned to make significant contributions to this shift towards increased sustainability. Expertise in root cause analysis, condition monitoring, and maintenance program optimization can directly contribute to meeting organizational sustainability goals and objectives by keeping assets running efficiently and safely over a longer lifespan.
A focus on energy efficiency in both the selection of new assets and working with Production teams through the operating phase of the asset lifecycle is also crucial for extending the lifespan of equipment.
Reliability Teams Meet the Circular Economy
The fundamentals of the circular economy, such as designing out waste, promoting recyclable materials, extending the lifespan of existing equipment, and repurposing existing assets, continue to align naturally with the principles of reliability and promote sustainability.
Reliability teams are the enablers of the circular economy—turning waste into opportunity through smarter asset strategies.
A few examples that come to mind include repurposing pumps and vessels that may no longer meet the production volume throughput requirements of the process, but that can be relocated and moved to other process systems or company locations rather than becoming scrap metal destined for recycling.
Retrofits to enhance energy efficiency and increase the utilization of OEM refurbishment programs are also common in asset life extension strategies. Reliability teams support these sustainability efforts through monitoring asset condition assessments and histories, evaluating energy efficiency retrofit opportunities, and identifying components that can be refurbished.
At the design stage, the reliability team’s input into project design can support the development of modular, repairable, and recyclable equipment. Applying methodologies such as reliability-centered maintenance to develop maintenance strategies from day one can also extend asset lifespans. In this way, the total cost of ownership (TCO) can be minimized while significantly contributing to meeting corporate sustainability commitments.
Asset Health Monitoring Bridges Between Reliability and Sustainability
The proliferation of automated sensors, IoT equipment monitoring, and AI-based analytics is giving reliability practitioners the ability to monitor asset health continuously, efficiently, and affordably. This means that we can easily track energy and water usage, emissions, and other metrics at the equipment level.
Reliability practitioners can then use this data to calculate reliability metrics such as mean time between failure (MTBF) and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). This data can inform the reliability analysis of asset efficiency in terms of energy usage, equipment performance, and overall sustainability.
Reliability practitioners then use the outcomes of this analysis to recommend and prioritize maintenance activities or asset upgrades that can simultaneously benefit operational production while reducing environmental impact and minimizing energy usage.
Linking Reliability Indicators to Sustainability Objectives
With the ever-increasing importance of sustainability in modern organizational strategic priorities, the key performance indicators (KPIs) used by reliability practitioners are expanding.
We still track and monitor metrics such as downtime, availability, equipment reliability, and maintenance costs, but we have expanded to include carbon emissions per operational hour, energy used per widget produced, and consideration for industrial carbon pricing and emissions trading. Reliability practitioners need to understand and consider sustainability frameworks in our daily work.
We should engage with the Environmental and regulatory-focused teams within our companies and break down the silos and barriers as we address this opportunity.
Many readers are aware that the choice of equipment at the design selection phase impacts the reliability of the production line, the ease of maintenance, and the associated maintenance costs.
What is often overlooked is that equipment selection can also be a significant contributor to the overall emissions intensity of our production facilities. Suppose one of the company’s goals is to reduce its carbon footprint, energy usage, and emissions intensity.
In that case, the decisions made at the design stage will have a significant impact across the 25–50-year lifespan of many production facilities.
From Maintenance Goals to Sustainability Goals
Sustainability is now well embedded in organizational goals and objectives. It is now a company’s asset performance requirements that affect the bottom line, regulatory compliance, and company reputation. This means that building sustainability into today’s asset reliability strategy is an expectation, not an option.
Reliability practitioners are expected to consider how to reduce their carbon footprint through asset selection and maintenance activities, minimize energy usage and emissions, select materials that are easier to recycle or reuse, and deploy asset monitoring tools to measure their sustainability performance.
Reliability practitioners play a valuable role as organizations accelerate their environmental resiliency and sustainability efforts.
