Driving Sustainability in Europe’s Factories

A company can have an ambitious sustainability strategy and detailed carbon-reduction plans while still overlooking opportunities to cut energy consumption at site level.

“Corporate sustainability ambitions often fail to translate into concrete objectives and actions for maintenance and technical departments,” warns Wim Vancauwenberghe, Director at the Belgian Maintenance Association, BEMAS.

That is one of the central findings of the More4sustainability project funded by Interreg NWE, which brought together companies and organisations from Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Germany to develop a framework for translating corporate sustainability ambitions into practical action on the factory floor.

The need is clear. In 2024, industry accounted for 23.9% of the EU’s final energy consumption, with electricity and natural gas together representing around 65% of industrial final energy use.

The final MORE4Sustainability benchmark, collected in 2024, covered around 50 companies. About 60% reported having a mission, vision and values aligned with sustainability, while nearly half were actively embedding it into their organisational culture. A similar proportion had performance-management systems tracking indicators such as emissions and energy consumption.

The sample should not be considered representative of European industry as a whole: it included a relatively high share of companies already active or relatively mature in maintenance, asset management and sustainability.

“Energy Agency, industrial electric motor systems account for about 60% of global industrial electricity demand and around 25% of global electricity use.”

“A lot of companies act on sustainability, but it’s normally at a very high level,” says Rob van Dongen, a consultant at Dutch maintenance and asset-management consultancy Mainnovation.

For maintenance professionals, that points to the real sustainability gap: having emissions targets is one thing; translating them into decisions about asset performance, maintenance practices and equipment life cycles is another.

Sustainable asset management is not simply about replacing old equipment with greener alternatives.

“It is about managing industrial assets throughout their life cycle while balancing reliability, safety, cost, energy efficiency and greenhouse-gas emissions,” notes Vancauwenberghe.

That means considering what assets are purchased, how efficiently they operate, how they are maintained, when they should be upgraded and when replacement makes sense. The MORE4Sustainability Framework groups these decisions into four areas: Asset Portfolio Optimisation, Asset Health Optimisation, Energy Consumption Optimisation and GHG Emission Optimisation.

For maintenance teams, the connection is often straightforward. A leaking compressed-air network, inefficient motor, poor insulation or deteriorating pump may never appear in a sustainability strategy, yet all can directly affect energy use and emissions. According to the International Energy Agency, industrial electric motor systems account for about 60% of global industrial electricity demand and around 25% of global electricity use, leaving substantial scope for efficiency improvements.

“Maintenance and asset management can help to improve the sustainability footprint of a company,” says van Dongen.

One of the biggest barriers to sustainable asset management today is organisational.

In many companies, sustainability belongs to one department, maintenance to another, production to a third and energy management to a fourth. Each has its own goals, KPIs and budgets.

“There are quite some levers that the technical department, the maintenance department or the service department can use to contribute to energy efficiency or emissions reduction,” Vancauwenberghe says.

“But the technical department may have to make the investment while the financial savings appear in the energy, operations or sustainability budget.”

A maintenance manager may therefore face a choice between an investment that improves reliability and lowers maintenance costs and one that improves energy efficiency but requires additional work. The financial benefits of reduced energy use may appear elsewhere.

“If maintenance is evaluated primarily on maintenance cost and asset availability, there may be little incentive to use part of its budget for improvements whose financial return is booked elsewhere in the organisation,” Vancauwenberghe says.

For a department facing budget constraints, the logic is simple: “If you have only one euro, you can only spend it once.”

The challenge, then, is not simply environmental. How companies allocate capital and measure performance shapes what gets prioritised on the factory floor.

According to van Dongen, companies making progress do not treat sustainability as a separate initiative. They connect it with objectives maintenance organisations already understand: reliability, safety, energy efficiency and cost performance.

One example highlighted by the project is Royal Swinkels, the Dutch family-owned brewing company.

“If there are people on a higher level with a motivation to adopt sustainability, then sustainability will work at this moment,” van Dongen says.

But senior-level commitment is only the starting point.

“You need a driving force in the company to make sure that things will happen,” he says.

One lesson from the project may come as a surprise: sustainable asset management does not necessarily begin with major capital investments. Some opportunities lie in existing assets and routine maintenance.

“We have shown that also with partial upgrades and smaller changes, but also with day-to-day maintenance practices, you can contribute a lot to the improvement,” Vancauwenberghe says.

Thermal insulation is one example. Industrial equipment may have been designed and insulated decades ago, when safety rather than optimum energy efficiency was often the priority. Valves, measurement equipment and other components may still be poorly insulated.

Fixing compressed-air leaks and reducing steam losses can deliver further savings while revealing where energy is being wasted.

“I know that many organisations say, well, we have already done all of the easy things. However, I think in practice, they are still there,” van Dongen says.

Another opportunity is to link energy performance with asset condition.

Maintenance teams already use vibration, temperature and lubrication data to detect early signs of failure. Energy consumption can provide another indicator.

“If the energy consumption of an asset increases under comparable operating conditions, it is an indication that something may be wearing or clogging. It can also be a clear tell-tale sign of a developing failure,” Vancauwenberghe says.

Electrical Signature Analysis is one example. By analysing electrical signals such as current and voltage, it can monitor energy consumption and help detect electrical and mechanical abnormalities in motors and driven equipment, but also energy losses associated with cavitation or pump impeller wear. But technology is only part of the equation. Accurate energy data matters, but acting on it matters more.

“If you don’t register your technical failures and you don’t register the losses that are related to a certain technical failure, the only thing that you will improve is the commonly known technical failures,” van Dongen says. The same applies to energy.

“If you don’t know where you lose your energy, then you don’t know how to improve.” Without that visibility, organisations are effectively, as he puts it, “driving in a fog”.

The challenge is therefore not simply to collect more data, but to connect energy consumption with maintenance history, asset condition and production performance.

Technology and data alone will not close the sustainability gap. Maintenance and engineering professionals also need enough knowledge to participate in sustainability decisions. Vancauwenberghe notes that in informal show-of-hands polls during presentations to maintenance audiences, typically only a small minority indicate that they know the distinction between Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions – Scope 1 referring to direct emissions from sources owned or controlled by the organisation, and Scope 2 to indirect emissions associated with purchased electricity, steam, heat and cooling.

“There is still a big gap in knowledge in this field,” he says. “How can they contribute to improvements if they don’t even talk the language and know the vocabulary?”

The MORE4Sustainability programme has responded by developing training and online learning for maintenance and asset-management professionals.

“The goal is not to turn engineers into sustainability specialists, but to give them enough knowledge and vocabulary to contribute meaningfully.”

The most important challenge, however, is financial.

“Most of the current maintenance and asset management budgets consist of what we have to do in terms of preventive maintenance,” van Dongen says.

Without dedicated funding, sustainability improvements compete with established maintenance priorities. Building the business case is therefore crucial: lower energy consumption reduces operating costs, better-maintained assets reduce losses, and extending asset life can defer capital expenditure and avoid premature replacement when continued operation remains preferable from a life-cycle perspective. Lower emissions can also reduce carbon-related costs in sectors exposed to carbon pricing.

Companies making progress are translating sustainability objectives into technical objectives and integrating them with reliability, safety, and cost performance. Most importantly, they are making sustainability part of asset management.

As van Dongen puts it: “Make sure that you are at the table with the people who make the decisions on sustainability.” For decades, maintenance has focused on reliability, availability, safety and cost.

“Those priorities remain. What is changing is that sustainability is becoming another dimension of asset performance.”

Five places to look for hidden energy losses

Some sustainability improvements do not require major capital investment. Maintenance teams can often identify energy-saving opportunities in existing assets and routine practices.
1. Check insulation. Poorly insulated equipment, valves, and measurement points can cause significant heat losses, particularly across large industrial sites.
2. Look for compressed-air leaks.. Leaks can waste energy continuously and are often detectable with relatively simple inspection methods.
3. Monitor steam losses. Steam losses can indicate opportunities to improve both energy efficiency and equipment performance.
4. Watch energy consumption. An unexplained change in an asset’s energy consumption under comparable load and operating conditions can provide an early indication of developing inefficiency or equipment problems, such as clogged filters, cavitation or pump impeller wear.
5. Connect the data. Combining energy consumption with maintenance history, asset condition, and production data can help identify where technical problems create both economic and environmental losses.

Text: Nina Garlo-Melkas Photos: Shutterstock