Profit-conscious business managers are increasingly emphasizing the modification of products and manufacturing processes to save energy. The industrial sector, in fact, has recorded more significant improvements in efficiency than either the residential or the transportation sector.       Improvements in manufacturing can be classified into three broad, somewhat overlapping, categories: improved housekeeping—maintaining furnaces and adjusting lighting; recovery of waste—recovering heat and recycling waste by-products; and technological innovation—greatly redesigning products and processes to embody more efficient technologies.

Buildings

     In the 1950s and ’60s efficient energy use was often neglected in constructing buildings and houses, but the high-energy prices of the 1970s changed that. Some new office buildings built in 1980 use only a fifth of the energy used in buildings constructed just ten years earlier.

     Techniques to save energy include designing and siting buildings to use passive solar heat, avoiding over lighting, and using better insulation and storm windows. A “life-cycle” approach, which takes into account the total costs over the entire life of the building, rather than merely the initial construction cost or sales price, is encouraging greater efficiency. Also, the retrofitting of old buildings, in which new components and equipment are used in existing structures, has been successful.