The proliferation of cyber‐physical systems introduces the fourth stage of industrialization, commonly known as Industry 4.0. There are many framework and researches have been conducted to implement the concept of Industry 4.0 in a customized way for different manufacturing and service requirements. In this article, a smart factory framework is presented by vertical integration of various components that incorporates industrial network, cloud, and supervisory control terminals with different functions, such as production, maintenance, energy consumption, water consumption, and so on, in a factory for optimizing resource utilization and eliminating all type wastages to enhance sustainable manufacturing. Moreover, this kind of self‐organized system enables the factory to achieve higher efficiency, minimized negative environmental impacts and improvements in other key performance indicators. To evaluate the outcome of this model implementation, a case study has been conducted on a cement plant where it is evident that after implementation of this model of sustainable manufacturing system the key environmental performance indicators such as specific energy consumption, carbon footprint, specific water consumption was reduced. It is observed that after implementing the sustainable manufacturing techniques, there is a substantial improvement in various performance indicators, those are, production volume of the factory was increased by 13.24%, process waste percentage came down by 12.79%, OEE improved by 12.94%. The major environmental performance parameters like specific energy consumption came down by 9.33%, specific carbon foot print came down by 9.33% and specific water consumption came down by 3.12% after implementing the sustainable manufacturing model.

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In this research work, different parameters have been studied which affect the energy consumption of belt conveyors. The effect of conveying distance and vertical lift on energy consumption was studied in detail by collecting energy consumption and other associated data of belt conveyors from different cement plants and analyzed with the help of different statistical analysis. The highest specific energy consumption was found to be 0.0011 kWh/Ton‐m in the smallest belt conveyor of 15 m and the lowest specific energy consumption was found to be 0.0007 kWh/Ton‐m in the longest belt conveyor of 100 m. Specific energy consumption is reduced up to 36% per ton‐meter of material conveying in the longest belt conveyor compared with the smallest belt conveyor. On the contrary, the specific energy consumption for different vertical lifts is found almost the same. Hence, it can be suggested that for horizontal conveying, the series of belt conveyors should be replaced with a single long conveyor to achieve maximum conveying efficiency and to lower specific energy consumption. The above study will be helpful for heavy industries such as cement plants, steel plants, and so forth to reduce their energy consumption on belt conveyors and achieve the environmental sustainability goals. At the last part of the study an equation is derived for estimating energy consumption in belt conveyors by applying multiple regression analysis. The proposed equation will be helpful for estimation of energy consumption of belt conveyors according to which the decision for conveyor length can be taken.

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