Global Scale
Resources
7
What is the potential revenue from seriously addressing resource efficiency? Improving non-labour resource productivity might enable a revolution in manufacturing and conservative estimates , for the UK suggest:
•£10 billion p.a. in additional profits for manufacturers – a 12% increase in average annual profits.
•300,000 new manufacturing jobs – a 12% increase in manufacturing employment.
•A reduction of 27 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent p.a. greenhouse gas emissions– 4.5% of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2010.
Sometimes resource efficiency can be as simple as just looking at a product with different eyes. A colleague did so with a washing machine manufacturer and saved them huge amounts of money just from the copper saved annually by rearranging the product’s internal layout. It is time for the “we’ve always done it this way before” to become “we want to be different and better for all.”
At the conceptual design stage there are many opportunities for financial savings. Designing out waste is important in product design infancy as choosing carefully the processes, the materials and the disposability options at an early stage can facilitate operational efficiency and make cost savings particularly as environmental legislation is changing regularly. The next process is to consider low carbon design from where you are accessing raw materials to how much energy and water they require for manufacture.
Reducing energy at the manufacturing stage is positive but not enough, companies in the broadcast and connected digital media industries need to consider the downstream carbon or the energy that your customer will use with the product. Reducing packaging reduces costs, avoiding duplicating devices such as chargers and cabling both reduce the impact on the environment. Using packaging that can be recycled, is lightweight and resists impacts from transport makes corporate sense.
Most of the energy in electronic products is used in the ‘in-use’ phase but as product life-cycles become shorter this may not be the case. Producer responsibility goes much further than a ‘nice to have strategy’ in their publicity, legal responsibilities may soon be making companies accountable for their products throughout the life-cycle and this means greater financial obligations.
So as you wander around the stands and ponder the new technologies, think about what you can do to keep this industry alive and exciting within environmental constraints.
If you want to learn more about non human resource efficiency contact me at IBC j.west@7gen .eu
1http://www.nextmanufacturingrevolution.org/nmr-report-executive-summary/
Broadcast Beat Magazine / Sep-Dec, 2014