Comment & Analysis
On 24th June, the IMechE is hosting a conference on sustainable manufacturing. The event is timely with the UK Government having published their Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy in March and this is also the year in which the UK will be hosting the UN’s climate change conference, COP26.
‘Industrial emissions’ is a broad concept and the UK’s decarbonisation strategy covers a diverse range of activities: from metal production to the food and drink industry and everything in between. In total these sectors comprise a sixth of the UK’s territorial emissions.
When categorising sectors of the economy that will be relatively easy to decarbonise to those at the other end of the scale, many industrial activities are firmly towards the difficult end. This is for a number of reasons. In heavy industry, for example, certain processes are either difficult or impossible to electrify and they will require new technologies and infrastructure, including carbon capture and storage.
Then there is the tricky subject of carbon leakage. This is the idea that if one country implements stringent regulations or taxes on polluting activities, the companies involved will move production to regions where rules are more lax. The result of this will be the original country losing a slice of its manufacturing industry and it will also then have to import products from more polluting countries. The effect on global emissions will either be negligible or perhaps even an increase.
One proposed measure to mitigate carbon leakage is to impose a tax on imported goods based on the embedded carbon emissions involved in their production, known in the policy world as border carbon adjustments (BCAs). This has been advocated at an EU level by President Macron of France, but it is fraught with difficulties. Measuring the embedded carbon in, for example, a car is incredibly complex and the supply chain will involve multiple countries. BCAs are also considered a form of protectionism by some, so it might be some time before they are implemented at a level required to make any difference.
A policy like a border tax will also only be effective if it incentivises companies to innovate. To decarbonise the sector, manufacturing engineers will need to completely change the way they produce things. It will also be important to bring the cost of clean manufacturing down to the same level as the old fossil-fuel based processes that are now incompatible with our ambitions to meet Net Zero targets.
New strategies will include low energy manufacturing techniques, heat recovery, increased recycling, and more of what has come to be termed as remanufacturing. New technologies that are crucial for decarbonisation, like wind turbines and electric vehicle batteries, expend high levels of resources and energy in their production. It will therefore increasingly be important to consider the end-of-life of such technologies. Can they be designed in such a way that they can easily and cheaply be repurposed in the future? This would reduce emissions, resource extraction, and cost.
The IMechE conference, Decarbonisation in Industry: The Road to Sustainable and Cost Effective Manufacturing, will bring together experts from across the manufacturing sector to promote the various innovations that are being implemented to make the industry more sustainable in the future.
Register for the conference here. Alternatively to find out more information on Member rates and group bookings email eventenquiries@imeche.org.