IoT Business Case: Environmental Monitoring
Organizations of all sizes are looking for ways to lower their carbon footprint. To do this, they often need to start by measuring current greenhouse gas emissions. This can be as straightforward as examining your power usage, depending on the nature of your business. But what about when your business involves air, land or sea fleets for example?
Vehicles of all types tend to have a significant environmental impact due to direct pollution emissions, emissions from construction and maintenance and other factors. Businesses can create positive change by ensuring they use the most environmentally friendly vehicles, use the best route planning tools to minimize energy consumption and travel time, and use IoT solutions to ensure you only travel when you actually need to.
All that costs money. There are numerous ways to look at how to pay for such improvements. Examples include employee satisfaction, positive brand awareness, governmental regulation, compliance, tax incentives and market incentives. The key factor here is to be able to transparently and accurately measure your carbon and pollution footprint. This could be sample based where you apply measurement solutions to a representative sample of your fleet or a comprehensive solution where you’re getting data from every vehicle. You could take data over a short period of time or you could get data continuously. Different vehicles and use-cases need different solutions.
From this data, you can then determine the causes of environmental impacts, apply mitigation, and measure again to see if the situation has improved. Small changes can be made that have significant impact. In this situation, it could be certain models of cars that are particularly harmful, in which case some sort of incentive for drivers to purchase newer vehicles could help. Or drivers could be idling their cars in the parking lot until orders are ready for delivery, in which case some sort of lounge would be an easy solution.
If we tie Environmental Monitoring back to the business drivers — 1) Make money, 2) Save money, 3) Legal compliance, and 4) Reputation protection — you can see clear ties to regulatory/legal compliance. Many of the improvements that can be made may also save your company money and improve your reputation. Additionally, a reduction of carbon generation opens up money making opportunities, as you can take advantage of new markets for selling carbon offsets.
If you are interested in monitoring, and monetizing your organization’s environmental impact, the right vehicle data collection device is key. F3 can help you choose the best solution for your business.
