When someone talks about eco-friendly hybrid and electric cars, we generally understand that to mean vehicles with greater energy efficiency than their predecessors. When we talk about green video cameras, are we measuring against the same yardstick?
Certainly energy efficiency is one benchmark; however, for a camera to be truly green, we have to map its impact across the entire value chain – from raw materials and product design to manufacturing processes to packaging and logistics flow, and ultimately to disposal and beyond.
While the energy savings owners experience with electric and hybrid vehicles do not actually offset the premium price tag, eco-friendly cameras tell a completely different story. Customers who invest in green cameras generally find that their total cost of ownership is comparable – or in some cases, less than –non-green counterparts.
For an integrator, green cameras provide a great entry point with customers who are seeking strategic partners that can help them achieve their sustainability goals.
In addition to long-life products that consume less energy, green camera manufacturers can provide a host of support services to help integrators succeed in this growing market, including: site design tools and best practices training to ensure quick and smooth installations; remote diagnostics and management tools to minimize the need for onsite service calls; and automated firmware and security upgrades to optimize performance while preventing exploitation of vulnerabilities.
What Makes a Camera Green?
While there is no magic bullet when it comes to protecting our environment, green cameras represent an important step forward in sustainability and good global citizenship. Here’s a closer look at what actually makes a camera “green”:
Raw material choices: Perhaps the most significant difference between green and non-green cameras is in the choice of raw materials. Typical video cameras contain a long list of elements, from aluminum, zinc and stainless steel to a number of chemicals, minerals and synthetics. To minimize environmental impact and landfill waste, green manufacturers choose to use recycled plastics – sourced from discarded CDs, water bottles, personal computers, etc. – instead of virgin material.
They also eliminate substances that are harmful for people and the environment, including toxins such as halogen and PVC – commonly used in outdoor cables as well as cameras – and bromine, which is mainly found in printed circuit boards and transistors. As the list of restricted substances continues to grow, green manufacturers work with materials suppliers to replace them with greener, safer alternatives.
Lower energy consumption: Energy consumption represents 60-80 percent of a camera’s total environmental impact. In order to improve energy efficiency without compromising camera functionality, green manufacturers incorporate several innovations. One is smart compression technology developed specifically for video surveillance applications, which preserves areas of the frame with high forensic value – such as facial details and license plates – at high resolution while smoothing areas of no forensic value, such as walls. This significantly reduces bandwidth consumption and storage requirements. Reduced storage requirements leads to significant energy savings in data center cooling, because companies need fewer servers to store the video.
Another is extremely low-light sensitive sensors and lenses which eliminate the need for costly external illumination. These are important energy-saving features for maintaining adequate surveillance in darkened after-hours environments such as schools and retail stores. Other technologies like motion detection analytics can be used to detect intruders and trigger lights to turn on or initiate a verbal warning broadcast through an intercom system.
Thermal imaging cameras and radar detection technology provide another green alternative to 24-hour lighting with their ability to detect activity even in pitch darkness and rain. Like their visual camera counterparts, they, too, can be programmed to trigger a response when detecting intruders.
Other enhancements include highly-efficient chipsets specifically designed for surveillance applications that reduces a camera’s power consumption.
Green cameras reduce energy consumption in other ways as well. Designed for long life, they tend to require fewer repairs and replacements than lesser-quality cameras. This translates into fewer truck rolls for installation and maintenance and therefore less fuel consumption over the life of the camera. It also leads to fewer cameras are being dumped in landfills or incinerated.
More compact design and packaging: In a push to consume fewer resources, green manufacturers are designing smaller cameras with modular components that make them easier to assemble and disassemble for repair and recycling. They are also using the same criteria to intelligently design and manufacture the accessories used to mount and install the cameras.
In concert with that effort, they are fabricating the packing boxes to correspond more closely to the size of the products. Smaller packaging not only lowers the carbon emissions per dispatched unit, it also lowers the transport costs for those products. In addition, manufacturers are opting for biodegradable and recycled packaging materials wherever possible to minimize long-term impact on the environment.
What Makes a Manufacturer Green?
Green manufacturers take a multi-pronged approached to reducing their carbon footprint – one that encompasses an eco-conscious and sustainability commitment from their customers and partners. Some of the areas where green manufacturers are making improvements include:
Transport emissions: Green manufacturers are choosing more fuel-efficient vehicles for their own fleets and negotiating with suppliers to lower their carbon footprint as well. Their efforts to streamline the logistics chain – from materials transports from suppliers to product transport to distributors – involves locating distribution centers as close to markets as possible to shorten transport routes and selecting freight carriers that generate lower carbon emissions.
On-premise energy consumption: Green manufacturers are continually modifying their own internal operations to be more environmentally responsible and energy efficient. This ranges from replacing lightbulbs with more energy-efficient LED lighting, to installing smart building technology to control lighting and HVAC usage based on room occupancy or other programmable parameters. They also conduct environmental training programs to educate employees on how they can contribute to reducing the company’s environmental impact.
Collaboration across the supply chain: Green camera manufacturers collaborate with their distributors, partners and suppliers to ensure compliance with applicable environmental laws and regulations across the entire chain. This includes adhering to international directives on hazardous substances and regulation on the registration, evaluation, authorization and restriction of chemicals.
Being a good global citizen also entails addressing social and ethical questions such as corruption, human rights violations and use of child labor. These green companies work diligently with their value chain to ensure that their products do not contain any conflict minerals – such as gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten – sourced from countries where their sale would be used to finance armed conflict.
Creating a Sustainability Partnership
As more users continue seeking out partners who share their commitment to eco-friendly technology and sustainable solutions, green camera manufacturers are taking the opportunity to get in on the ground floor by addressing those concerns directly with the architectural and engineering firms who are tasked with developing LEED designs for their customers’ properties.
Sharing camera system design expertise, providing technical documentation, and offering educational webinars, whitepapers and other support services are just a few of the ways manufacturers are helping architectural and engineering firms devise ways to more greenly integrate network camera systems into LEED projects.
Because innovations in green building materials continue to push the bounds of energy efficiency, the security industry as a whole has had to adapt its own technology to co-exist with those new materials and meet emerging LEED standards. In the not-to-distant future, competing for green projects might even include listing the percentage of each mineral and chemical contained in the product and its carbon footprint.
Fredrik Nilsson is VP, Americas, for Axis Communications and is the author of “Intelligent Network Video: Understanding Modern Video Surveillance Systems” published by CRC Press and now available in its second edition. Request more info about Axis at www.securityinfowatch.com/10212966.
