This will fundamentally change scale and location decisions for factories to the point where they will be so advantageous that people will want them at the end of their street
-Steve Evans
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, industrialisation swept the globe and changed it forever: humanity mastered the art of transforming the world’s raw materials into the ‘stuff of the world’. Today, everything around us, from the cars we drive, to the goods we own and the clothes we wear is largely the product of industrial manufacturing.
But industrialisation also had an unintended effect on the global environment – contributing to the increasing burden of carbon emissions, pollution and waste – and it’s widely accepted that a new ‘green’ industrial revolution is urgently needed.
“It’s clear that current processes cannot be sustained indefinitely,” said Professor Steve Evans. “As well as the environmental effects, the world has a finite amount of natural resources, and current processes are probably only 10% efficient at converting them into usable product.”
Evans leads the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing, which connects systems engineers and business analysts at Cambridge’s Centre for Industrial Sustainability with researchers at Cranfield University, Imperial College and Loughborough University. The Centre is funded with £5.7 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
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Image: Factory
Credit: The District
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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