From Birdcage Walk

The latest in our ongoing series of updates about activities at the Institution.

Dear Member,

It has been London Fashion Week and we can report that a certain German car manufacturer must be doing well judging by the number of black courtesy cars that appeared in town.  We however took the opportunity to comment not on their engineering, but the carbon footprint and waste in the industry they were supporting.  There’s an amazing statistic that on average each of us is now buying 60% more clothing than we did in 2000.  As well as the extra water and energy involved in growing or producing the materials and making the garments, there is still not any established recycling process either.  We have issued a Position Statement to try and get some equal focus on the clothing industry as we did on the food sector and its waste back in 2012. 

This coming week however we are looking forward to our Trustee Board on Wednesday.  This is just one of six times a year that our Trustees meet.  The focus of this meeting in the annual cycle is always to set the overall financial and programme targets for the following year.  The staff at Birdcage Walk then go away and ‘square the circle’ to bring forward detailed projects and budgets within those guidelines for approval when the Trustees next meet in early December.  Our plan is to share those overall goals with you next week, but as a sneak preview it seems certain that they will involve greater focus on member engagement combined with an improvement in our financial performance.  Importantly at this Board Meeting, the Trustees will also discuss and hopefully launch our two main Reviews which will run through this year and into early 2019.  The alignment between the topics for those two Reviews (on Governance and on Finance) and the priorities for next year’s business plan is aimed to make their recommendations all the more easy to implement as they emerge.

Finally, we have published our first edition of the new-look Professional Engineering magazine this week.  Hopefully you have either now got your copy or you can see the content via the online app.  We would really welcome your feedback as to whether it has gone far enough in our aim to increase the engineering depth of our articles.  We want it to be a useful commentary for the informed reader and not something more superficial that you can find elsewhere.  There should also be much more about the contribution that our own membership specifically is making to ‘improving the world through engineering’.  Do let us know your views, either here in the discussions session at the bottom, or via the traditional ‘letters to the editor’ route that is still open of course.

Colin Brown

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