For years, we have been saying that one of the benefits of the Light Green Machine concepts will be ease of maintenance, for maintenance workers will be able to easily pick up items that now need a crane or two or three people to lift.

Your humble ANSI pump is a good place to start looking at this.  For instance? Why is the casing still cast iron? This makes as much sense here as do cast iron dryers (meaning--no sense at all). There are plenty of plastics that could serve well in most applications, in fact, often they may be superior, not just equal, to cast iron.

The pump shaft should be a hollow "torque tube" not a solid steel shaft.

This leaves the rotor, which likely will still need to be steel or stainless steel.

In the end, we have a pump, at least in its disassembled form, that can be easily picked up by one person.  

I really suspect the cast casing is about as justifiable as the cast iron dryer--it exists because we have always done it that way and pump manufacturers have a significant investment in casting facilities.