Before we hurdle headlong into investing in green and sustainable initiatives and technology, it is important to understand the challenges that manufacturers--and their vendors--will face. It's one thing to issue press releases and conduct feel-good task force meetings, but it's another to actually be ready to meet the challenges of implementing a green/sustainability strategy, especially if enterprise data and applications are involved.
The main problem is that configuring a business so that we can understand our carbon footprints, mitigate our greenhouse gases, and lower our energy and water consumption is actually hard to do at a fundamental level. That's because we have to start at the bottom of the technology food chain and change how we look at the intersection of technology and business at every level.
Source: Managing Automation