Before we hurdle headlong into investing in green and sustainable initiatives and technology, it is important to understand the challenges that manufacturers--and their vendors--will face. It's one thing to issue press releases and conduct feel-good task force meetings, but it's another to actually be ready to meet the challenges of implementing a green/sustainability strategy, especially if enterprise data and applications are involved.
The main problem is that configuring a business so that we can understand our carbon footprints, mitigate our greenhouse gases, and lower our energy and water consumption is actually hard to do at a fundamental level.
Source: Managing Automation