Industry 4.0 in Resource Efficient and Cleaner Production: A case study from the food sector in Jordan

The concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere has reached 400 ppm, a higher level than at any time in the history. As clearly referred at IPCC reports, human activity has been behind this extraordinary increase. Transition to a net-zero at industries is one of the crucial measures to meet the international commitments regarding climate change and thus keep global warming below the 1.5 °C limit. Resource Efficient and Cleaner Production (RECP) provides a practical example of de-coupling between economic growth from environmental degradation and thus supports achieving the net-zero transition. In that context, RECP has been applied to 12 industries in Jordan that resulted in saving of over 1.6 million Jordanian Dollars (JOD) annually, 22,181 MWh/year of energy; 63,844 m³/year of water; 404 tons/year of raw material; and reduction of 8,086 tons/year of CO₂ emissions. Integrating Industry 4.0 tools into RECP has been shown to be very efficient as the industries have become able to monitor and validate all saving data on real-time bases and optimize using natural resources accordingly. Saving measures and performance evaluation were linked with IoT sensors and blockchain at one food industry in Jordan and found to be accurate and very helpful to assess input–output outflow within the industry boundary. Employing IoT with blockchain to facilitate collecting data related to RECP at the industry level can be a great advantage to RECP and help in monitoring carbon footprint accurately. It is recommended to scale up RECP-Industry 4.0 model to other industries and leverage this experience to expedite transition to circular economy.