Will Manufacturing Ever Become Sustainable? No, But At Least Stop Doing Stupid Stuff That Slows The Regenerative Economy Of The Future

You might have noticed that everyone says they are “sustainable” these days. True statement. You cannot find any company globally that claims to be unsustainable. Every big company has an ESG function which means they have someone who writes their annual report on how many good deeds they have done and has a statistical heap of actions nicely counted up to prove it (see ESG Reporting Frameworks such as GRI and CDP). The reason is that there’s an incentive to comply with the stakeholder pressure to report such things. ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. All clear, right? Good so far.

Think about it. You produce something. You have factories. You procure metal containers. You ship. You transport via land. You distribute to customers. All of this has a footprint. Denying that is next to impossible. Except we all do. Otherwise, how could we look our children in the eyes?

New York environmentalist Jay Westerveld coined the term greenwashing in a 1986 essay about the hotel industry’s practice of placing notices in bedrooms promoting the reuse of towels to save the environment, which typically is better characterized as a cost-saving measure. Greenwashing continues today (see 10 Companies and Corporations Called Out For Greenwashing). The entire notion of a carbon footprint was invented in 2004 by the former oil company BP’s PR consultants Ogilvy & Mather, a WPP company (See The carbon footprint sham). Full disclosure, I’ve also worked for WPP, so I guess I’m not innocent either.

BP’s campaign introduced carbon calculators which went viral and gave all of us a bad conscience for flying. For some, it has become a psychological affliction. You could call it carbon angst. As long ago as 2002, BP wanted consumers to think of “Beyond Petroleum“ when they heard BP. If you think marketing doesn’t change reality, think again. Except it didn’t last. As of today, BP is still a major oil company, although with an ambitious renewable push (see After Abandoned ‘Beyond Petroleum’ Re-brand, BP’s New Renewables Push Has Teeth). In principle, marketing changes perception, not reality. But sometimes perception changes reality, too.

Stop Doing Stupid Stuff

If ESG simply means considering risks to your business it becomes business as usual. That means it has no value aside from being part of a normal disclosure process for what you are thinking about when you do your business. On the other hand, if ESG sets challenging targets that you do not always reach, with stretch goals, then it could have an effect. Sometimes, it is easy to know what to do if you look out for it. As Professor Steve Evans at Cambridge University says, just Stop Doing Stupid Stuff.

I don’t think ESG is the true villain. Reporting impact of any sort, done methodically and honestly, increases transparency. This can be good. So what is the problem here?

Manufacturing legacy is the issue. Years and years of neglecting the impact of factories and supply chains on the planet have taken a toll, although there is hope among the world’s top factories (see Global Lighthouse Network: Unlocking Sustainability Through 4IR). Unfortunately, the industry’s sustainability reputation is shallow. Even though 88% of industrial businesses are now prioritizing sustainable manufacturing, pollution to the air, water, and soil is still rampant. The results we have to show are poor because of lack of innovation, poor monitoring systems, and also a lack of expertise of what it would entail. Polluting practices largely continue. And despite new tech, lots of attention, and ESG reporting, it is about to get worse. Why do I say that?

In the coming decades, manufacturing will accelerate (see The Future of the Factory: How technology is transforming manufacturing.) If anything, we have become more dependent on physical goods than before. Historically, that was called being “materialistic.” It used to be seen as a bad thing until some of us realized that being “virtualistic,”meaning glued to the idea that the Metaverse will solve all the world’s problems, is even more of a delusion. We are physical beings that crave material realities such as consumer goods made in industrial factories, living in cities, being physically mobile, and more. That’s reality, not being bad.

Some claim new technologies will help us become more sustainable. Not as in we will consume less, or travel less, of course. In reality, we gave up the “less” vision long ago. That’s now seen as old fashioned and moralistic. However, the hope is that new technologies will smoothen the supply chains, and 3D-printing will foster localized production, farm-to-table for organically sourced products that you conceive of, source, and print yourself. There are tiny specs of hope here. The Desktop Metal spinout Forust can now 3D-print wood made from sawdust and a nontoxic binder, even including lignin, the part of natural wood that creates the hallmark grain (see We can 3D-print wood now.)

Don’t get me wrong. I am super excited about printing wood. But alas, I don’t think it will reduce the demand for real wood. It will simply become another use case for using wood in more applications. This is the problem with most technology; it is additive rather than substitutive. The real fix would be to invent something better out of an abundant material such as thin air. Think hydrogen. Scientists are working on it, but it is a pipedream for now, even as a significant source of car fuel.

Manufacturing can perhaps become slightly more sustainable. For example, electric vehicles might make transportation slightly less polluting, on average, at least a decade from now (see Are electric cars ‘green’? The answer is yes, but it’s complicated.) But we have to admit that manufacturing still is a wasteful practice and might remain so for a while. Necessary, soon to be more innovative, perhaps, but not the poster child of sustainability. The sooner we all realize that, and tell our children, we can move on to other things. Such as using less, spending less, traveling less, all without enjoying life less. The paradox is, we might have to do much more manufacturing in order to achieve more sustainability. What do I have in mind?

Manufacturing can only be sustainable if we make modular things out of components that can reassemble and become ingredients in other products and efforts. The problem is that modular manufacturing is not what we do now. The business model needs to be supported before it can stand alone. We have dreamt of this for some time (see Is the Future of Automation Modular?) But only a few vendors, such as Vention (see Modular automation shaping the future of manufacturing,) support it. But the ambition must be more than modular.

Upcycling on steroids will not mean not just reusing and recycling, but also regenerating. Regeneration is a vision that goes far beyond sustainability (see How Businesses Can Regenerate the Global Commons.) That’s good because sustainability was a farce. It was a nice compromise put together by some clever people back in 1987 who wanted to save the planet without messing too much with governments and big business (see Our Common Future.)

When Should We Abandon Sustainability for Regeneration?

Sustainability has been hampered by petty politics, short-termism, and cluttered ideas. Recall “sustainable development.” I felt very inspired by it at the time. However, we can all agree that in retrospect there is no such a thing. That’s not necessarily bad. It just means we need to refocus. We need to go from additive manufacturing to subtractive manufacturing, and I don’t mean the traditional material removal processes such as CNC machining, laser- or water jet cutting that preceded additive manufacturing. I mean true subtraction.

It is often helpful to think back to elementary school math: two minuses, minus multiplied by a minus, or subtracting a negative, make a plus. For example: 1 – (- 1) = 2. Subtraction doesn’t always make something smaller! In fact, subtracting a negative is the same as adding a positive. Imagine two individuals Jack and Jill that each own a business. Say that the allowed carbon limit in Jack’s industry is 70 units and the carbon limit in Jill’s industry is 100 units. If Jack manufactures and racks up 100 units, he owes the planet (represented by his government) a carbon debt because it should not exceed 70 units. Jack’s trading partner Jill, who has a slightly smaller company and only emits 70 units, decides to take on 30 units of that debt. In carbon accounting, that’s currently seen as a good thing. Say Jill gets paid the same in dollars. Now Jill is $30 poorer and Jack is $30 richer, but the environment is not 30% better (or 60% or 70% better, in case you wondered.) The debt payments have simply redistributed relative wealth and given both parties a good reputation for trading nicely amongst each other.

In math, multiplying a negative made a positive for Jack, but who cares about Jack? I would say what we have is more likely, in practice, a sum total of something approaching 160 carbon units. The 100 from Jill, another 30 from Jack who feels he can pollute more because he just offloaded 30 units. Then, we likely have 30 more from Jill who now also feels she can pollute a little more because she just took on somebody else’s pollution load and is a good corporate citizen. An economist sees a cap-and-trade market being created, but a sociologist sees the bait and switch for what it is. Having said that, it works some of the time, like it did with acid rain. The cap part of the equation can sometimes make up for the silliness of the trade part. It is an example of an imperfect regulation that we might have to accept until we come up with something better.

To summarize and translate a bit here: Jack is typically located in a poorer part of the world and Jill is in a richer part of the world, or a richer neighborhood, take your pick. Jill will simply keep polluting and look better because she is offsetting the manufacturing emissions. Jack will be incentivized to keep taking carbon payments and keep polluting. Nowhere in this game will there be a better future. Yet, it’s all the politicians and CEOs want to think about (see COP26 Finally Set Rules on Carbon Markets. What Does It Mean?)

Instead, we should remember elementary school math and use less so we can manufacture less. Or manufacture far better so it doesn’t matter. As soon as we can, whatever we manufacture, needs to be regenerative (see Carol Sanford’s The Regenerative Business.) It needs to be made out of an abundant resource. For example, producing replacement tissue and organs at scale is regenerative manufacturing in medicine–but we are still scratching the surface of such an industry which relies on engineering biology so it is more in our control. The magic of regeneration is that it might allow us to still consume a lot because it is regenerative consumption that doesn’t tax the ecosystem.

For that to work, we would need large scale biological machines that carry out present day industrial tasks. The real question is whether there can be regenerative manufacturing outside the use of organic material. Would systemic self-repair where robots can carry out their own restoration to factory conditions given that material resources are made available to them be regenerative? If the robots are made of steel then we are back in the good old industrial age.

Will Technologies, Startups, or Regulations Get Us There? Or Will Regular Humans Come Up With Better Ways?

Technology is not there to build fully autonomous systems that begin to regenerate the biological ecosystem. I’ve just started a systematic review of all promising, emerging eco-innovations for an upcoming book. I’m doing deep dives into batteries, bioplastics, distributed energy, water tech, and space tech, including R&D, soon spinning out of universities, and startup stories from exciting founders already changing the world. In doing so, I’ve realized that neither the venture capital community nor the world’s governments or big corporations that invest in these things have anything like a rudimentary roadmap.

Carbon capture and storage as we know it today are certainly not going to get us there. The current approaches are clumsy and short-sighted and will hardly reach the required scale. Moreover, I predict the public outcry against massive carbon-eating installations pestering our surroundings will make the protests against windmills and power lines seem like a mere blow in the wind. Other technologies will have to be invented. Massive progress has to be made in the structure and fabric of societal production units, which will not happen overnight or without failed experiments. Therefore, all glory to the startups experimenting with carbon capture, biomanufacturing, mass-scale 3D printing, fission energy and a great deal more.

However, a hundred years from now, I predict that what will have saved us (if we get that far without ecosystem collapse) would be a technological breakthrough that is not yet invented. That’s pretty obvious, right? But what that means is not obvious. We have to redirect something like 10% of global GDP, perhaps more, towards high-risk innovation. We also have to regulate our way out of the problem for now and face the short-term consequences to current industrial actors and consumers alike.

Despite what some claim, regulations do matter. Regulations such as The Clean Air Act of 1970 in the U.S. dramatically improved air pollution and got rid of notable amounts of acid rain from sulfur dioxide emissions killing aquatic life and forests using a cap-and-trade approach. The Montreal Protocol of 1989 slowed the atmospheric ozone layer depletion from halogen gasses and proved that multilateralism could work. Since then, there has been little progress, apart from scattered renewable subsidies, which have leveled the playing field for solar and wind energy over the past few decades.

UN climate summits certainly don’t help much. What happened between The Limits to Growth (1972) provocation, was standstill until The Brundtland Commission (1987),which got implemented in the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21 (1992). The Paris Accords (2015) got us the target of limiting global warming, and Glasgow’s COP26 (2021) got us a tiny step towards implementing that target. We need different instruments. And the irony is that those instruments might not be global in nature at all.

On the bright side, the awareness is now there. The last few years have produced a new world order post-climate denial. Climate emergency might suddenly have become politically correct, but what happens now is still contingent on a mix of science, engineering, social factors, and a good bit of luck.

What Actions Might We Need Right Now?

We now need a similar effort to curb methane emissions. We need global regulation on biodiversity where nations, organizations, and individual property owners are responsible for biodiversity on their lands. We need a commitment to moving towards a (mostly) biology-based manufacturing system. And, yes, we need binding factory emission standards worldwide. We also need a global ban on fossil fuel subsidies. We need all of this in the next decade, if not sooner. It’s not partisan or anti-industry; it’s common sense. But, what we cannot do is delude ourselves.

What I just said we need will very likely not happen. Not until each of us adopt a behavioral eco-efficiency framework. It has to start on a personal level or in smaller groups. All behavior does. But then, behavioral economics teaches us that it can become contagious. After all, the previous industrial revolutions also spiraled by contagion. Once one textile manufacturer got an efficient spinning jenny, others soon followed. Entire towns grew up around factories. We need a thousand NEOMs, the futuristic manufacturing city being built in Saudi Arabia. But our machinery needs to be more flexible, not just cognitive and mechanistic. It eventually needs to be organic.

We should be so lucky to see cities grow around synthetic biofabs, or even better, around new, urban, organic forests and park systems. The tree canopy covers 47.9% of Atlanta, but we need hundreds of thousands of Atlanta’s on steroids (see Regenerative Cities). More like Atlantis, I guess, but not literary versions like the ones depicted by Plato, Francis Bacon, or Thomas More. When we eventually drown in a flood of industry-induced ecosystem collapse, a legacy of past industrial revolutions’ emissions and infrastructure, an organic, workable postdiluvian world 2.0 needs to resurface. This is obvious.

Modular Manufacturing Is a Better Stopgap Than Sustainability

Until we regenerate, manufacturing cannot be sustainable. Not because vested interests are against it but because of the nature of the beast. Except for a few liminal cases, manufacturing is just not natural. It is precisely as the word says: manufactured. Even the EPA’s take on sustainable manufacturing is about minimizing, not eliminating environmental impacts. The sooner we realize that, or rather, the sooner we admit it, we will be able to move on from minimizing carbon emissions. However, modular manufacturing is a far better stopgap before fostering a much needed regenerative future. To be sure, modular can still mean wasteful. But with a fundamentally modular approach, we can adjust and reconfigure. Modular means factories of the past won’t exist as abandoned infrastructure. Modular means you reuse elements, even if you are not in complete circular economy territory. But there is little sense in thinking modular is sustainable in the long run.

Safeguarding biodiversity, and making big bets towards a more important mission of complete transformation to foster a regenerative approach will, in turn, end manufacturing as we know it. The Glasgow COP26 event did none of the sort. Neither did it push hard on sustainability, nor did it foster modularity. That’s not good enough. We continue to do stupid stuff. But manufacturing itself is not stupid. Or rather, even if it is, it’s all we’ve got at the moment. Which explains why COP26 didn’t get all that far. We need innovation to get there. We cannot just stop producing.

For now, the best organic production unit in the world is a human being. Acting in a group, we constitute veritable biological factories, with no synthetic AI needed to invent it. It’s time to mobilize ourselves instead of waiting for brownfield factories to magically turn into a greenfield. This is not about you simply recycling your waste, driving an electric vehicle, or growing diverse plants in your backyard, but perhaps that helps you directionally focus on even smarter things. Regenerate your soul, then regenerate the world, fostering change at the appropriate scale. Don’t be afraid of a modular approach. Either way, eco-efficiency must be behavioral. If you don’t change, it slows the regenerative economy of the future, because others won’t change either.