TRANSFORMING MAINTENANCE INTO A STRATEGY FOR SUSTEINABILITY

1. What is Sustainable Maintenance

Currently, the industry plays a fundamental role in the functioning of society as we know it. It produces essential goods and services for our daily lives, such as food, clothing, transportation, housing, and even entertainment. Additionally, it contributes to the surrounding communities by creating jobs and serving as an accelerator of technological advancements.

The world and our lives would be unrecognizable without this sector, we only need to look at the evolution and significant change that occurred after the first industrial revolution. This event completely transformed the structure and organization by which countries themselves were ruled, contributing to the globalization of markets and the production of never-before-seen products, allowing for the exchange of goods and services between various parts of the globe, ensuring access to essential products for populations that never had that possibility.

Despite its significant influence, it is also imperative to address that even with all these benefits, its activity involves negative and even harmful points for society, namely the large consumption of energy, raw materials, and the emission of polluting gases, thus having a significant impact on the environment and people’s lives.

Today, we live in a period with an increasing growth in environmental awareness and the global challenges that come with it (such as climate change and biodiversity loss), making it necessary to find solutions to minimize the impact of industrial operations.

This is a common dilemma across all industrial sectors, and it is the main reason many companies define a logical structure in which they set the objectives to be achieved and the procedures to be implemented to reach that goal. Thus, one of the areas with particular relevance in this context, due to its transversality and scope, is maintenance.

Since maintenance is a common and unavoidable factor in companies, regardless of their area of operation, it is mandatory to perform interventions, either corrective or preventive, to ensure the functioning of their assets. This area of activity can be one of the levers that allows entities to adopt measures and practices that preventively ensure the mitigation of identified negative effects.

4. How to Implement Sustainable Maintenance

Similar to any transition process, whether related to a digital component or just a change in procedures, the main driver of its implementation is always people; in this case, the responsibility primarily falls on the maintenance team. To initiate this transformation, the first step is to explain to the technicians the reasons and objectives to be achieved with this change, as their participation is absolutely crucial to the success of a project of this nature. The greater the number of people involved, the easier and simpler it will be to analyze current maintenance management and start making improvements in critical aspects, focusing initially on key points due to their relevance. Here, the following stand out:

Analysis of the Frequency of Maintenance Tasks:
Maintenance tasks are essential to ensure the proper functioning of equipment or systems and extend their useful life, but it is not always easy to conceive an effective plan that meets all technical requirements and is feasible at the same time. One of the first aspects to consider is the importance of maintaining a particular asset, this point being directly proportional to its criticality. For these cases, it is good practice to try to minimize the frequency of these tasks as much as possible without experiencing negative effects on performance. Thus, the requirement of the maintenance plan is reconciled with the implementation of more efficient methods that reduce environmental impact, also contributing to the feasibility of the maintenance plan.

Analysis of the Environmental Impact of Maintenance Activities:
Maintenance involves energy consumption and, depending on the task, the use of polluting products and harmful waste to the environment. One way to counteract these adverse effects is to use renewable energy sources when possible and to reuse or recycle waste from these activities.

Sustainable Management of Materials Used in Maintenance:
A preventive maintenance model should define, from its conception, the harmonization of its optimal performance level and the use of materials that limit its environmental and social impact. There are analysis models [4], that allow choosing between new and used spare parts the most sustainable option from an economic, social, and environmental perspective. By combining these factors with the reliability of the material in question (a new spare part has a higher cost and environmental impact but also presents greater reliability, unlike a used spare part), it is possible to choose the ideal solution for each situation.

One of the best methods to implement sustainable maintenance is to analyze information and evaluate the performance of equipment affected by maintenance management. This can be enhanced by a digital transformation process through the implementation of a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System). The dynamization of such a tool allows the organization to gain numerous advantages, such as quick access to centralized information, whether of the assets’ characteristics or their maintenance history, increase the quality of analysis through indicators that facilitate decision-making based on reliable information, and can be a decisive tool for audits and compliance with legal requirements.