Can Industry Really Save the Planet?

Industries have long been criticized for their environmental impact, but some companies are starting to break away from the pack and set new standards for sustainability and innovation. These companies aren’t just cutting back on emissions and waste, but reinventing the entire life cycle of their products. And who they are may surprise you. But it’s not just about cleaning up their act, many of the clever solutions being implemented also help the bottom line. Everything from using more recycled materials to using cutting edge technologies for a more nimble manufacturing system. I even had a chance to see some of this firsthand. For a greener and more sustainable future, industry is going to have to make some big changes. How can it be done? And more importantly, can they even achieve it?

As many of you already know from my previous videos, I’m a fan of EVs, solar panels technology, and energy storage for the home. That plus the many other technologies available to us are making it easier for each of us as individuals to clean up our acts. But that will only get us so far. It’s going to take big industries to make a substantial difference in finding a more sustainable way forward.

For instance, in 2022, global e-waste reached a record 62 million metric tons, which is an 82% increase from 2010.¹ Projections are saying we’re going to hit 82 million metric tons by 2030.² Vehicle manufacturing, particularly the painting processes, consumes a significant amount of water resources.³ And shipping all of those consumer electronics and cars around contributes approximately 3% of global CO2 emissions.⁴ Not to mention the incredible air pollution created by ships burning heavy fuel oil.⁵

Before I jump into what some companies are doing about this, I want to make it clear that the cool stuff I’m about to hit on isn’t a “get out of jail free” card for any company. There’s still a long way to go on all of this, but I do find some of what these companies are doing pretty exciting. It’s showing that there is a path forward. So to kick things off …

Apple Greens its Packaging and Products

Despite the name Apple, this tech giant’s electronics don’t exactly grow on trees. And yet Apple is blazing trails in sustainability. Aiming to become a carbon neutral business by 2030, Apple has been steadily reengineering its products and packaging to reduce waste and incorporate recycled materials.⁶

The company is famous for the sleek aluminum bodies of its phones, tablets, and computers–a metal that’s not only durable, but also endlessly recyclable. Only recently, though, has Apple engineered an alloy from 100% recycled aluminum that meets design performance standards. That means the enclosures for the Mac Studio, Mac mini, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and iPad are now crafted entirely from recycled aluminum. In 2023, 71% of the aluminum used across Apple’s product lines was recycled, resulting in a 68% reduction in aluminum-associated emissions compared to 2015 levels.⁷

Given the environmental and human costs of mining, it’s critical that as much mineral content as possible is recouped, recycled, and repurposed.⁸ In 2023, more than half of the cobalt and nearly a quarter of the lithium in Apple product batteries came from post-industrial and post-consumer recycled scrap.⁶ That same year, roughly a quarter of the gold in Apple products–from the plating on printed circuit boards to the USB-C connector on the iPhone 15–came from certified recycled sources. And Apple boosted its recycled tungsten content to 99%!⁷

Hold up a MacBook Air with M3, and half the weight in your hand is recycled material. Some of it might even have come from a previous Apple product collected through the company’s trade-in program and disassembled by an employee following directions from an augmented reality system. Or perhaps the materials came from one of the 29 iPhone models that Daisy, Apple’s custom-designed robot, can disassemble into individual components for recycling.⁶

Of course, Apple’s famously sleek products are known for their equally slick packaging. But product packaging is responsible for nearly half of global plastic waste each year.⁹ To reach its goal of carbon-neutrality, Apple has reduced plastic in its packaging to just 3% in 2023. The company is now aiming for 100% fiber-based packaging, which it achieved with the fall 2024 Apple Watch lineup.⁷

It might seem risky for a brand known for its premium unboxing experience to switch to more sustainable packaging materials. But Apple is keeping it classy by printing labels directly on its boxes and overcoating with varnish instead of adding a plastic laminate or separate label. These painted labels ensure its branded packaging can break down like cereal boxes in municipal waste streams.

Apple is also ensuring that the fibers used in their packaging come from recycled paper, responsibly managed forests, bamboo, and even sugarcane waste. And taking its commitment even further, Apple is teaming up with RISE Research Institutes of Sweden to develop a wood pulp-based foam for product protection during shipping — a material designed to be tossed in the recycling bin alongside paper.¹⁰

BMW’s Manufacturing Flexibility

Apple isn’t the only company taking steps to reduce packaging waste and go sustainable. For a company that ships 10,000 cars and 36 million parts a day to production networks worldwide, BMW is also taking big steps to reduce, reuse, and recycle. While BMW is sponsoring this video, I only agreed to work with the company because there are some very cool things they’re working on that I thought you’d like to see. Like I said in the beginning, none of what I’m covering in this video gives any of these companies a“get out of jail free” card. BMW also left the editorial control of the video to me and gave me some incredible access inside their factories. After visiting their San Louis Potosi factory in Mexico and the Dingolfing factory in Germany, I have to say … I’m very impressed.

BMW’s goal is to reduce CO2 emissions by 40% per vehicle by 2030 (compared to 2019) over the entire life cycle. It’s implemented a strategy it calls the iFACTORY. It’s all about using digitalization with tools like data science and artificial intelligence to make a super efficient, precise, and flexible production system. This will not only help them with the bottom like, but their climate goals. You might think “iFactory” just sounds like a gimmick for marketing purposes (I know I did), but there’s really something to it.

Many automotive companies are building out brand new plants and manufacturing lines to manufacture EVs, but BMW is taking a different approach. The company doesn’t have dedicated lines that make only a specific car or drivetrain. Its production lines can make a wide variety of makes, models, and drivetrains back to back. For instance, this production line in the Dingolfing factory was producing gasoline models on the same line as hybrids and EVs … all at the same time. As they put it to me, the factory can easily follow customer demand and change things up on the fly while we transition to EVs.

BMW is also using LIDAR and virtual reality to help them keep up to date maps of their facilities. This helps them to be very quick and precise with changing customer demands and production planning. They’ve digitally mapped their entire production network. It allows production designers located in the headquarters to check out the maps in a web app that’s very similar to Google Street view. This makes it easier to rework production lines and plan out any changes that are needed.

The company has also been using LIDAR extensively throughout the facility to help automate moving finished cars through the quality assurance testing without a driver. BMW has partnered with Embotech to make this a reality. I could make an entire video just on this system … it was a little crazy. What the team is doing with this was pretty surprising to me. When the final cars come off the end of the production line, the factory itself makes a secure connection to the car, drives the car off the line and through the quality assurance test drive. It’s not the car driving itself, but the factory driving the car.

“We drive nearly 1,000 cars per day, AFW at Dingolfing. Nearly a distance of one kilometer is driving here to say. It’s the biggest LIDAR installation in the world. We have 200 LIDARs. We have the possibility to control the vehicle without any human interaction.”

The benefit is not having to transport a human worker from the end of the quality assurance area back to the end of the production line each time a car is finished. There’s also a benefit from the factory centrally controlling and automatically driving everything versus having independently driven cars. Like I said, I could make an entire video just on this part, but there’s more.

Many companies like BMW need to use one-way packaging materials to ship parts to various factories around the world. The problem the company ran into was that the dimensions of the standard European palette didn’t fit the standard shipping containers used globally. So, BMW developed a new modular box design to not only better fit the shipping containers, but to also reduce the amount of cardboard that needs to be recycled per trip. The new PAL 973 box design allows the factory to fill the shipping container completely, and this results in a 30% improvement in space optimization. There’s also no need for any kind of void fillers, like inflatable dunnage bags, to keep the boxes from shifting during transit. What this means in the end is that fewer shipping containers are needed overall, which reduces costs and shipping emissions. These “one way” boxes can also be reused for a second use by adding a clever, thin, secondary cardboard sleeve. This not only covers the old shipping labels, but adds extra rigidity and support for the second use. It may not be “sexy,” but companies can dramatically reduce their waste around logistics. Seemingly small changes to a box can have profound impacts.

As much as I geek out on logistics and genuinely loved seeing what BMW was doing with all of that, the thing that impressed me the most was probably the paint shop at the company’s San Luis Potosi plant. This facility is in the desert, so water is a very precious resource. Painting cars takes A LOT of water … and heat. For instance, BMW Group has reported that the manufacture of each vehicle at their San Louis Potosi plant uses 1.12 MWh of energy, 1.52 cubic meters of water, and produces 0.08 tons of CO2. That’s a lot of water … but it doesn’t have to be wasted.

Jose Julian Ledezma Sanchez showed me around their paint shop water reclamation and heat recovery system. If you haven’t seen this process before, it’s really wild. It involves dipping the entire car into vats of various chemicals, which all starts with the pretreatment line and gets the car ready for painting. The tanks are full of micro crystals of phosphate, zinc, manganese, and nickel.

“With these three phosphate crystals, we can generate the mechanical adhesion property to the next following coating layers.” -Jose Julian Ledezma Sanchez

The water is also heated to 60° C (140° F) as the cars are slowly rotated and lowered into the chemical bath.

“Here you can perceive that it’s very hot.” -Jose Julian Ledezma Sanchez
“Oh yeah … my glasses just steamed up.” -Matt Ferrell

After that step they’re put through rinsing tanks. The goal is to leave the metal with a microcrystalline phosphate coating, which will help the base coat of paint adhere in the e-coat process.

Now, all of this water is actually reused. All of it, like, 100% of it. They have an extensive water recovery process that at a high level is using three things: physicochemical treatment, bioreactor and filter media, and then the ion exchanger to remove ions, which results in deionized water at the end.

“All of this room is dedicated to recovered water. We are operating 24/7. We have a team that comes on site every day at any hour in order to control and to make sure that the bacteria is working. Because from the bacteria side we control the oxygen in the bioreactor, the amount of water they have, the amount of nutrients they need, the level of the population of the bacterias and we can control that. If we are not doing that, we will kill our ecosystem there.” -Jose Julian Ledezma Sanchez

It’s a very intricate process. Could you drink the water once all is said and done? Yes. Would you want to? Well, no … because it’s missing all of the minerals and elements we actually need in our drinking water. I saw some of the purity level readings at the end that showed a 1.8 microsiemens per centimeter reading. What that means isn’t as important as putting it in context with drinking water, which is usually around 500 microsiemens per centimeter. Bottom line: it’s clean and ready to use all over again in the production process and other alternative services, like irrigation and sanitation. And fun fact: that waste extracted from the water even gets a second life.

“These kinds of components can be used in the concrete industry, as an alternative fuel, or as a additive of aggregate of the concrete from the streets and so on.” -Jose Julian Ledezma Sanchez

But it’s not just about the water, it’s also about the heat. Remember how I mentioned that part of the process requires 60° C (140° F)? The paint shop needs a lot of heat, so they capture the exhaust heat from the system and reuse it elsewhere in the plant.

“After that there is only paints and then an oven cure all the paints and to make sure that everything, all the solvents, are evaporated. We have a heat exchanger in the ovens that save energy because all the remaining heat that goes in the chimney. Before that we remove all the heat and use it for example to heat it up my tank here.” -Jose Julian Ledezma Sanchez

Jose Julian Ledezma Sanchez took me below the paint shop automation line to see what it looked like from underneath. This is where you could see the heat exchanger setup.

“The blue ones are the heat exchangers, liquid and liquids. In one stream, I get the hot water coming out from the heat exchanger from the ovens and from the boiler. And in another stream, all the water inside of the tanks. And with this cross um cross link, we can transfer the heat from one water to another. And then we are making sure that we control the temperature.” -Jose Julian Ledezma Sanchez
“For example, this pipe sent back all the exhaust air and all the very hot air and sent back to the beginning in order to save energy as well and to reduce the gas consumption. So in that regard we are burning the VOCs. We have a very good uh level of VOC emission because we can have this kind of technology that avoid sending out the VOC and first burn it in the burner heat.” -Jose Julian Ledezma Sanchez

This setup isn’t that different from the desuperheater setup I have on my HVAC system in my house. My geothermal HVAC system captures the waste heat from the compressor and dumps it into a hot water holding tank. It’s basically preheating my water before it goes into my heat pump hot water tank, which saves me an incredible amount of energy for hot water. The idea’s the same here, but at an industrial scale. BMW is saving about 200 cubic meters of natural gas per month by reusing this waste heat.

But that leads to the final step.

Shipping Toward Carbon Neutrality

Apple, BMW, and nearly all companies rely on road, rail, air, or maritime freight to get supplies to their manufacturing site and to distribute their merchandise. Even companies committed to recycling their own products and reusing those materials still need to start with shipped goods.

Right now, if you add in the emissions of ports and warehouses, freight transportation accounts for 11% of global emissions. Moving goods via plane is by far the most damaging, emitting over 500 grams of CO₂ per tonne-kilometer. But moving goods by boat is a whole lot easier on the carbon budget at only 6.5 grams.¹¹

And that’s despite 95% of ships in 2023 still being fueled by petroleum products like heavy fuel oil and marine diesel ¹². With three-quarters of the world’s goods transported by ocean-going ships¹¹, what if we could make maritime shipping sustainable? What if massive container ships could run on renewable energy?

That’s exactly what maritime shipping giant Maersk is striving for. This Danish company is aiming for net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. That’s ten years ahead of the International Maritime Organization’s voluntary target of net-zero shipping by 2050,¹³ and independent verification by the Science Based Targets initiative confirms that Maersk’s goal aligns with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit on global temperature rise — a first in the maritime shipping industry.¹⁴

But how is it going to get to net-zero? By renewing its fleet with vessels powered by renewable fuel sources like biodiesel, methanol, and good ole wind. Biodiesel is great because it can be burned in a regular diesel engine, but the supply of biodiesel from waste streams is limited. And so, in January 2024, Maersk launched its first dual-fuel container ship, the Ane Maersk, which can accept either regular marine fuels or, preferably, bio-methanol.¹⁵. The company has signed for a total of 25 dual-fuel methanol ships, seven of which have already been delivered, and it plans on chartering more.¹⁶

In 2025 and 2026, Maersk will equip five tankers in its fleet with eSails, which are expected to reduce fuel consumption — and therefore emissions — by double-digit percentages.¹⁷ Developed by the company bound4blue, these 26-meter sails feature masts that automatically adjust to catch the wind, while fans inside the mast suck air across the rigid sail’s surface. This suction design generates six to seven times more lift than conventional sails for the same surface area, resulting in super-efficient propulsion.¹⁸

Now, wind is everywhere (except, when it’s not), and so are petroleum-based fuels. But methanol is not available everywhere, and certainly not in the quantities needed by container ships.That’s why Maersk signed an agreement with the LONGi Green Energy Technology Co. Ltd in China to produce enough methanol to cover half the fuel needs of its methanol fleet by 2027. This biomethanol is produced from straw and fruit tree cuttings, reducing emissions by 65% compared to petroleum-based fuels.¹⁹ Maersk’s contract with LONGi builds on existing methanol agreements with private companies in the U.S., Asia, and Europe, alongside deals made with the governments of Spain and Egypt.²⁰ By building this network, Maersk is laying the foundation for a global infrastructure to support its green initiative.

The shift to sustainable fuels comes with a significant price tag — biomethanol costs twice as much as typical marine fuels by some estimates.²⁰ But with companies like Apple, BMW, and others aiming for carbon neutrality in the coming decades, Maersk rolled out its ECO Delivery Ocean program. This initiative allows companies to pay a green premium to ship their products using sustainable fuel sources, helping them meet their emissions reduction targets.

In 2023, 212 customers opted to ship with the ECO Delivery Ocean program, collectively reducing emissions by 683,000 tons — an 84% decrease, even when factoring in the emissions from producing the greener fuel.²¹ Maersk’s ECO Delivery Ocean clients now include Volvo ²², Epson ²³, Nestlé ²⁴, Amazon ²⁵ and, of course, Flying Tiger Copenhagen ²⁶.

At the end of all of this, I don’t think these advances on their own means we’ve made it and that we’re suddenly all good with trying to clean up our industries. What it does show to me is that there is progress being made and that some of these companies are helping to raise the bar that their competitors will need to keep up with. And most of these changes aren’t just about hitting climate goals. These changes can also help the bottom line in the long run.