Comparative study on carbon footprint reduction in typical material process industries through use of renewable energy resources: a holistic approach

Non-conventional renewable energy resources (RER) help in reducing the GHG’s and realize UN’s SDG’s. Herein, the contribution of various RER towards reduction in carbon footprint (CFP) in typical process industries is presented as a comparative study. Various typical process industries as studied include footwear, textile, sugar, Dairy, paper-pulp, minerals and polymer. Estimation of CFP has been performed using respective power consumption (kWh) values for each process industry. Then, CO2 emission (kg) per kg of material processed has been estimated for respective RER using emission factor kg-CO2/kWh. Average net reduction (%) due to intervention of RER for various processing industries has been found to be significant 94.2%. Estimation show, possibility of significant reduction of minimum 20.6 kg (for dairy industry), maximum 15842 kg (for polymer industry) and average 4086 kg (average across industries) of CO2 emission per tonne of materials processed. Sensitivity analysis was performed with ±10% to ±30% variation in power consumption values on CFP. The order of more contribution in CO2 emission reduction, for various material processing industries is: Dairy > Mineral-Iron > Sugar > Footwear > Textiles > Mineral-Copper > Paper-Pulp > Polymer; and for various renewable energy resources: Wind ≡ Hydroelectric > Nuclear > Biomass > Solar PV.