w INDUSTRY FOCUS Food & Beverage


By Roy Green, Lean Six Sigma, Black Belt at Harford Control O


ut of over 200 world leaders that attended the COP26 conference in Glasgow, more than 100 pledged to end


deforestation by 2030. This, of course, is good news, but to know which of those made the pledge is also vitally important, as some countries are so much more involved in deforestation than others. I guess the true benefi t of this much-lauded agreement will become clear in the near future. We can only hope so. It is also interesting to note that there


are only nine years left between now and 2030 and, during the 2009 conference in Denmark, many world leaders made pledges – not least of which was to help less developed countries by granting them $100 billion per year by 2020 – to help with their green initiatives. They also made other pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thereby, at least, stop the rise in global temperatures and the potentially devastating consequences. Since then, however, greenhouse emissions have gone up, as have global average temperatures and, consequentially, climate extremes have become far more commonplace, with fl oods and wildfi res increasing across the planet. Sadly, the $100 billion per year pledged by the developed countries did not materialise, and the graph on the next page shows the extent to which this fell short year on year.


38 November 2021 | Automation


Promises made at COP15 haven’t been delivered


This shortfall in the delivery of commitments made at such globally important conferences leads to huge suspicion and not a little contempt for the outcome of COP26, especially when two of the major polluters, China and Russia, failed to attend. Incidentally, both China and Russia are far from the greatest polluters per capita. This dubious accolade remains with the USA. The USA and the UK, as well as other wealthy countries, should be leading the way by setting examples of what can and is being done to dramatically reduce the impact of greenhouse gases. It seems morally incomprehensible for wealthy nations – having had their industrial revolution and as a consequence caused massive pollution issues – to tell the developing and sometimes poorest nations that they cannot have their own industrial revolutions as they will destroy the planet. The wealthy nations have to set a good example and they certainly haven’t done so since COP15 in Denmark in 2009. If we really expect less-wealthy nations to act more responsibly than we did, then we have to help them. We have to plough in huge sums of money (and not just promise it because it sounds good) to such developing nations to seek and adopt greener methodologies and not simply to emit ‘whatever’ and ignore the


consequences or, even worse, talk a good line but continue with ‘business as usual’.


Food & drink production & wastage create huge emissions Bringing this problem much more closely to my home, the UK, food and drink manufacture is the largest manufacturing sector here and is apparently responsible for over 30% of our greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, as about a third of our expensively produced food is wasted, the destruction of this waste creates a further 8% to 16% of greenhouse gas emissions, dependent upon which pundits you believe. Whatever the actual fi gures, food production and the destruction of food waste cause huge emissions, both in the UK and worldwide – the Western World anyway!


How committed are we? If we are seriously committed to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, we must optimise food and drink production and distribution. Such a commitment creates huge challenges in ‘Choice of Packaging’ (recyclable or not), Right First Time Production (ensuring that production failures are largely eliminated and that products despatched ‘go out and stay out’, instead of becoming batch rejections due to allergen risk, incorrect packaging and/or incorrect date coding). Within the ‘Grand Global Plan’,


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