Measuring Environmental Sustainability of Industrial Machinery: From Energy Consumption to Avoidable Emissions

The concept of sustainability is increasingly central as industries strive to quantify and mitigate their environmental impact. This work presents a metrology-based method for measuring the environmental impact of industrial machinery. The proposed approach is structured in three steps. The first involves the creation of a checklist identifying the relevant components of the machinery to be considered for environmental impact evaluation. The second step entails the individual measurement of the environmental impact associated with each identified component. The third step aggregates these measurements to derive an overall assessment of the machinery's environmental impact. A key feature of the method is its ability to decouple the environmental impact attributable to the machine's operational phase from that associated with the idle phase, during which the machine is powered on but not actively used. As a case study, the method was applied to an industrial press. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach enables a reliable estimation of avoidable emissions linked to idle energy consumption, providing valuable insights for sustainability-oriented process optimization.