IIoT Unleashing Retail Solutions for a Greener Earth

Leading retail firms are using IIoT technology to drive innovation to conserve water, reduce waste, and support sustainability.

Climate change and planet protection are two of the world’s most pressing challenges. Technology and connectivity can play the most prominent role to unleash creative solutions for the greater good.

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Home improvement retail stories typically use a larger real estate, often with big landscaping areas. For the irrigation of this green patch, some of them face acute water mismanagement. This becomes more difficult for big retailers with larger outlets, more in number as well. Lowe also faced the same issue with its  900 stores, with their sprawling gardens. It’s irrigation devices would not read weather conditions and be showering the landscapes even during rainstorms, wasting water. To manage this precious resource, they needed a smart technology that could ensure modulated water flow based on current weather conditions and future weather forecasts.

Lowe teamed with HydroPoint and AT&T to install a smart system that utilizes a network of sensors to modulate water flow based on data. By using this data to determine how much and when to water, Lowe’s saves $5 million annually in water bills and also conserves 650 million gallons  . in addition, there were also savings in the form of energy required for  pumping and the water treatment plant, leading to effectively reduced  community greenhouse gas emissions by a considerable amount. In fact, data reports that the savings were of an equivalent of burning 84 thousand gallons of gasoline.

Smart irrigation controllers utilize  IoT solutions to allow more efficient, real-time maintenance of the connected devices at Lowe’s. This technology simplified minute leak detection, even if they were not large enough to show the physical presence or visible evidence of a leak.

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The immense promise of IoT will lead to more significant innovation that can help to create a better, more sustainable world.

In addition, a robust IoT platform generates massive amounts of data about processes and devices. This is a mining house of information and can be utilized for various strategic insights- which could be a priceless tool to manage natural resources efficiently.

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