My Garden Gate is killing the Planet

Garden gate

Before the weather turned too cold, I finally got round to hanging the new garden gate that I actually built months ago.

It was that or gardening. I hate gardening. I dislike doing a job that doesn’t stay done. You do something in the garden and a few weeks later you have to do it again! For a similar reason, I resented building this gate. We’ve lived here a while so this is the 3rd gate I’ve built. The last 2 were wooden kits that just rotted away. So this time I decided I would build a gate that would outlast me. So I found a source of lumber made from recycled plastic and built the gate from that.

Problem is it won't last forever. UV, moisture, temperature fluctuations and organisms destroy everything eventually so my gate will last longer than its wooden predecessors but will still disintegrate in time. And when it does, unlike its organic predecessors, the material will never fully break down – instead microscopic particles of plastic will enter the soil and then the water table and then the food chain.

As research is showing, one inevitable conclusion of this process is that these microscopic particles are now showing up in human blood. This is the unseen but bigger problem than high profile issues such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Micro-particles of plastic are estimated to already weigh over half a million tonnes and are literally everywhere – even in Antarctic Krill and fresh Antarctic snowfall.

Recently the team at Interactual Limited and JNDC Ltd has been involved in several projects attempting to catch these particles at source. The Tyre Collective is developing tech to collect the particles of rubber that abrade off tyres during contact with the road. Tyres wear out – where did you think the worn-off bits went?  Then there’s Matter., a start-up that has developed tech to collect the micro-particles of clothes that washing machines carry away in wastewater.

These are laudable projects but the issue is what do you do with the waste? To make collection affordable they need a commercially viable end-use. The problem is that no matter what you do with plastic waste, ultimately you’ll always end up facing the same problem of ultimate disposal. And every time a plastic is reprocessed it degrades – it’s functional properties decline. So unlike a material like aluminium, where 75% of all the material produced in history is still in use, plastics eventually become so degraded that they have little functional value any more.

We can extend the lifespan of a plastic product through the use of additives. For example UV stabilisers slow degradation in sunlight. But the material ceases to be a mono-material so becomes harder to re-process and when finally the plastic finds it’s way into the environment, releases even more harmful toxins as the material degrades.

So what ultimately do you do with plastics that are highly degraded? This waste can be captured for the long term within building or road materials. But eventually roads get scarified and buildings demolished and again the plastics are released into the environment. Or the plastics can be incinerated for energy generation. But you still have toxic, non-degradable ash to deal with.

So why can’t we just stop using plastics? Well, the problem is that they are just so damn ubiquitous. They can be moulded to almost any shape and present an astonishing range of material properties that make them, for example, slippy, grippy, bendy, stiff, conductive, foamy, rubbery, insulative, malleable, springy, thermally reactive and resistive, hygroscopic, hydrophobic and anti-bacterial. And moulding technologies can spit out plastic parts like sweeties so parts can be made in huge volumes and for next to nothing.

The functionality that they offer is now so embedded in modern life that they are written into some health and safety standards now. There are, for example, medical and food products that legislation will not allow to be built except in certain grades of plastic.

It’s this ubiquity that makes it so hard for us to reverse away from plastics. Think of almost any day-to-day product made of plastic. Try to imagine what else it could be made from. And then consider the cost of that alternative. Face it – we are all addicted to plastic and, if you think as a species we are struggling to give up fossil fuels, wait until we actually get serious about giving up plastics! (we haven’t yet incidentally).

It’s no accident then that considerable time and effort is being invested in the development of organic plastics. At this point we need to consider the confusing terminology being used around these.

Compostable plastics turn into compost, right? Well, no, not always. Some types of compostable packaging simply break down into smaller pieces like microplastics. Most compostable packaging also doesn't carry high quality nutrients like organic materials that would generally be composted, which is why some say the compost that comes out of it— if processed correctly — is extremely low quality.

But a plastic that is biodegradable is good right? Not necessarily. Biodegradable simply means that an item can be broken down into increasingly smaller pieces by bacteria, fungi or microbes to be reabsorbed by the surrounding environment. The trouble is, everything we use or create can be called biodegradable because eventually everything will break down – from organic waste and wooden cutlery to plastic packaging or steel machinery. It could just take a very, very, very long time. As a result this is probably the most misunderstood, misused and abused term in the green lexicon.

The reality is that there are very few organic plastics that breakdown into pure natural organic components and those that do exist have limited properties and therefore limited applications.

So do I feel guilty about my new garden gate?  In my head I assuage my guilt by the fact that the material I’ve used is already recycled. But the reality is that I’m leaving a few kilos of plastic outside to gradually decompose into micro-plastics ironically because the wooden alternatives decompose too fast!

I’d like to suggest that we need a Space-X style award for this.  This problem really isn’t getting nearly enough media exposure but I guess it’s also not very sexy because the evidence is so small that it’s literally hidden from view. So perhaps the first step is for everyone to recognise in themselves that our way of life is now entirely dependent on plastic and that it’s just not enough to reduce, reuse or recycle or to give up single use plastic– we absolutely must give up fossil fuel-based plastic entirely.

My name is Ben May and I’m a plastic addict…

Green hushing

Did you notice that Lego has decided not to move ahead with the development of bricks from recycled bottles? (https://lnkd.in/dx6zzA6c)

The cynical press might see this as evidence of a large corporation rolling back on it’s net-zero targets. But, if you are in the product innovation industry, you know that the route to success is often by way of multiple failures. What I believe is admirable about Lego is that they have taken the brave step to announce their failure. And they are clear that their commitment to net-zero remains the same so I suspect that they are already exploring other options.

The other takeaway from this story is that it is REALLY difficult to assess the total carbon cost of doing business. It would be fair to assume that using recycled PETG would have a lower carbon cost than virgin ABS. If it’s difficult for Lego with all their resources, how much more difficult is it for SMEs?

It was great to attend the Green Marketing seminar run by the KINGSTON CHAMBER OF COMMERCE at Barwell Business Park, Chessington yesterday. Sam Perryman introduced us to the concept of ‘Green Hushing’ (see below) where companies choose to keep secret their sustainability targets for fear of being accused of green-washing.

I pondered whether one reason for this trend might be that it is so incredibly difficult to build a complete picture of a company’s carbon footprint. Can you be sure, for example, what the refuse collector is doing with your recycling? Are they recycling or exporting it on a slow boat to Indonesia? It only takes someone with a grudge against your company to do some digging to expose skeletons in your green cupboard and for your brand to take a huge credibility hit.

There are ways to resolve this beyond green hushing. There are now loads of green accreditations that help you dig in to every corner of your business though perhaps there is a need for some consolidation within the accreditation industry as right now it’s a confusing landscape. What will help will be the EU Green Claims Directive https://lnkd.in/dVNNEUYz

At least initially this will only be targeted at big business but the tools being developed to support the directive, such as the green claims code https://lnkd.in/dNNwX6du can help SMEs just as much.

For me, the most important lesson to learn from Lego though is to be transparent about your green credentials. Perhaps any green claims need to be caveated with the honest admission that they are stated on the basis of available info and that any investigation that reveals contradictions is welcome and will be acted upon. With transparency and humility, there’s no reason to hold back from letting the planet know that you care about its future.

Author: Ben May 2023

Industry 4.0 Part 2 – a Tale of Two Philosophies

When technophiles extol the benefits of Industry 4.0, there seems to be 2 visions of the future and they seem almost diametrically opposite in ambition and philosophy. It may be that there is a place for both – if market forces continue to be allowed to prevail without radically different and more sustainable metrics for success.

Philosophy 1: The Dark Factory

This term sounds more sinister than its reality attests. Dark factories are so called because they have no lighting. They need no lighting because there’s no need for light – no one works in them…ever. I saw a presentation by RR who had developed an assembly line robot that regularly assesses itself to determine whether it is functioning within acceptable margins. If it isn’t it takes itself off-line and is replaced by a spare. It repairs itself, calling up replacement parts as required. It then puts itself back into the assembly line. All with no human intervention whatsoever.

I can’t help but get excited by this – got to admit to being a sucker for a robot. But my worry is that this philosophy is unsustainable and ultimately self-defeating. Henry Ford understood that if he paid his workers twice the norm, they would become the customers for the products they produced. Early manufacturing needed a very large workforce and thus the middle class was born. Since the dawn of the first Industrial revolution the owners of the means of production have been forced to share the wealth generated by production with a workforce because there could be no production without human labour. But not now – the industrialists no longer need a workforce.

The standard neo-liberal response that ‘there will always be jobs, but they will just be higher value and more cerebral’ just doesn’t cut it for me. There might be some jobs but not nearly enough and the elephant in the room is that not everyone is suited to that kind of work. So, who ultimately would buy the products produced in dark factories if the wealth generated by production is not shared with a workforce? Robots are not (yet) aspirational consumers.

Moreover, a top-down approach to Industry 4.0 demands that the supply chain keeps up with the technological pace of change to ensure a fully integrated supply chain. This inevitably leads to further ownership accretion of the means of production as the small guys fall away or get subsumed into an Industry 4.0 hegemony.

Philosophy 2: The Cottage Factory

The other interesting trend in manufacturing is the democratisation and commoditisation of the means of product development and production. The much hyped 3d printing revolution where individual consumers can make anything they need has not happened and for good reason. It ignores the need for knowledge and expertise beyond common sense to ensure that a product is safe, reliable, and fit for purpose. However, there has been a revolution in the development of easy-to-use building blocks that make the process of product development far more accessible. These range from free to use CAD software to low-cost prototyping technologies and indestructible test and development platforms (such as Raspberry Pi and Arduino).

But another technology revolution has also been taking place at the supply end. It started with industries such as publishing, where now anyone has the means to self-publish a book or release music for mass consumption of a quality indistinguishable from the big publishing houses or music labels. The rise of prosumer production technology is allowing individuals to self-manufacture. Low cost but high spec equipment now available includes 3d printers, CNC mills and lathes, circuit printers, laser cutters, injection moulding machines, pick and place machines and Cobots (robotic arms that politely wait for humans to move out of the way rather than squishing them to pulp). It has now become possible and affordable to create a production cell cost justifiable for start-up production volumes and scalable to meet mass demand without fear of over-investment.

This gives rise to the other possibility offered by this philosophy – the democratisation of the means of production. Suddenly it can be cheaper to make local, to supply local and to de-centralise the means of production. Localisation instead of globalisation. And I can’t help but believe that this is a more sustainable approach both socio-economically and environmentally. Ironically then Industry 4.0 could be a return to a social and economic model more like the cottage industries that prevailed before the first industrial revolution with looms and blacksmiths forges replaced by highly technological and flexible production cells capable of producing the full breadth of consumer product.

It's a frustration to me that UK government policy seems to be built around the first philosophy. With a manufacturing sector dominated by micro and SME businesses, it’s my opinion that the UK sector has the agile mindset that makes it far better placed to capitalise on the 2nd philosophy – and I reckon it would be better for society and for the planet too.

Transitioning from start-up hustle?

At Interactual, we love to get involved early in product development. However, we rarely get the chance! The process of design is far more accessible and democratised than ever before. Capable free CAD packages, cheap 3D printers and electronic development tools such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi have made it possible for anyone with basic practical skills and common sense to develop a product through to a first demonstrator without requiring much in the way of outside assistance.

This can be a two-edged sword. In the same way that the rise of self-publication of music or literature has led to an explosion of extremely average media, a lack of external intervention in design can lead to a lack of critical analysis and inventor bias.

There also comes a point in the development process when common sense is no longer enough and further development requires a lot of specialist knowledge. Critically, it also requires the design team to begin to transition from febrile start-up hustling to the more formalised, measured, and systematic approach required for Design for Manufacturing (DfM)

This transition point presents 2 primary challenges: -

• What specialist skills are required as the project moves forward and how do you fill these skills gaps (external capability vs upskilling the current team)? It can be challenging even to identify what skills are needed, let alone know how best to acquire those skills.

• Is your current team capable of transitioning? Some founders love the hustle but bridle at the more structured development demanded by DfM. It may not be efficient or simply not professionally rewarding for the same team to continue the development all the way to production.

To help start-ups and founders make the transition, Interactual’s approach is firstly to stress test the development up to the point at which we have been approached. We typically ask 3 questions: -

1.       Does it meet a clearly defined user need?

2.      Is it technically feasible?

3.      Is it commercially viable?

If, by asking these questions, we haven’t already killed the project, we then seek to identify the highest risks in the project and create a nascent risk register. Once the major project risks are known, the skills required to mitigate the risks can be identified and the skills gap becomes evident. Interactual sees itself as a design and support service – we only seek to fill the gaps within a client’s internal team. Moreover, we want our clients to own the secret sauce and so, as much as possible, we seek to train our clients to undertake as much of the DfM process as possible and equip them to critically evaluate the work of external specialists.

Most importantly, we train our clients in the implementation of simple process tools that are the foundations and building blocks of a future risk and quality managed design and production process and, by doing so, gently transition our clients out of start-up mode.

Drop us a message if you are interested to find out more - contact Benmay@interactual.co.uk

Adventures in Development Testing Part 1

All Fingers and Thumbs
How to assess the risk of an unavoidable finger trap

Anyone who has designed anything with moving parts will know a thing or two about finger traps. We look for anywhere where a finger could accidentally be inserted into a product and try to avoid the possibility of finger insertion in places where mechanical forces might be applied that could result in injury or worst case severing of the digit. Always the preferred solution is to design out the finger trap completely.

But how do you assess injury risk where a finger trap is unavoidable? 

We recently developed a product where a trap was unavoidable. This occurs when 2 components are hinged away from each other with spring-assisted closure. We needed to understand whether the minimum spring force required for the parts to reliably and repeatedly close would cause injury, if opened to the maximum possible extent, and then released onto an inserted finger. To complicate matters further the hinge is not a fixed hinge but instead comprises 2 sprung retaining cables with compound curves for mating surfaces. So the arc of travel is complex and likely to be different every time the hinge is opened.

Calibrating force against displacement

Our first step was to define ‘acceptable’ forces. What are the forces that can be applied to a finger before bruising, fracturing or breakage occurs or before permanent damage is inflicted? Surprisingly these forces do not appear to be defined in standards – we eventually discovered a couple of research papers that identified these force limits in the context of electric window mechanisms for cars. Gory reading but evidentially very credible!

For our tests to be realistic, we needed to recreate the point loading that would occur if a finger were placed in harm’s way and find a way to measure the force applied to the finger. After a lot of thought we adopted the following approach:-

1. We cast several sizes of simplified test ‘fingers’ in soft silicone

2. We calibrated the fingers by compressing them in our tensile test machine recording the force applied at increments of deflection

3. We built a test rig to retain the test finger at various positions within the hinged joint. Our high-speed camera, operating at 1000 frames per second, was mounted to the rig perpendicular to the rotation of the hinge to capture the point of maximum deflection of the silicone finger as the hinge was released under the force of spring-loading.

4. We were able to measure the deflection on the recorded high-speed footage at the point of maximum compression of the finger and extrapolate the force from the tensile test machine calibration tests. 

Test rig to retain the test finger at various positions within the hinged joint

Chronos 1.4 High-Speed Camera

The slow-mo video shown at the top is slowed 35x - the real time duration of the video is 0.3 seconds. If the slow-mo video looks alarming, keep in mind that the silicone fingers are not intended to be compressively representative of real fingers. We went for the softest silicone to maximise deformation so that our measurements could be as accurate as possible.
Sorry if it makes you wince!

TRL’s – Why Hardware and Product Start-ups need to use them… carefully.

The first Technology Readiness Level scale (TRL) was developed by NASA in the 70s to assess the maturity of a technology prior to integrating this technology into a system. These days the most widely used variant is composed of 9 levels, which categorise the progress of the development of a technology from basic research into first principles (TRL1) through to level 9 when a technology is in its final form and is ready for commercial deployment.

I’m not going into a detailed description of the standard 9 TRL scale here – there are loads of sites that can help with this. This infographic produced by Dick Elsy for the HWM Catapult gives a basic overview.

The TRL metric is increasingly used by all stakeholders in the development of every kind of technology, product and even service as a way to define business maturity. Potential Investors will increasingly define a minimum TRL before which they will not engage. Government manufacturing sector strategy has been steered by TRLs – the High Value Manufacturing Catapults have been established to focus on the Applied R&D stages between TRL4 and TRL6. And many grants and funding mechanisms define application suitability using TRLs.

So it’s worth all start-ups mapping their position and intended trajectory against the TRL system and not only for external communication. TRL’s are a useful project planning and tracking tool.

Nevertheless, care should be taken with their use for three reasons:

Variance between TRL systems.
Beware! There is no standardised definition. So be sure to check that all stakeholders are singing from the same hymn sheet.

Readiness Level Proliferation.
In his seminal book on the subject of measuring technology maturity ‘Did I Ever Tell you about the Whale’, William Nolte coins the term readiness level proliferation to describe ‘the tendency of managers to create variants of the classic TRL to help measure and manage specific programmatic areas of concern’. That’s kind of him – I suspect many are invented by consultants so that they can lay claim to the invention of a ‘new’ system.
So we have (to name but a few) Investment Readiness Levels, Product Readiness Levels, Market Readiness Levels, Manufacturing Readiness Levels and specialist variants such as Software Technology Readiness Levels.

There is some established correlation between some of these systems. For example, the Engineering and Manufacturing Readiness Levels shown in the table below comprises 9 levels, correlating approximately with TRLs 4 to 9. But these correlations are inconsistent between systems that are inconsistent themselves.

How Long is the Piece of String?
Let’s take an electronic product as the example. It has a chipset which is a proprietary component and is therefore, as an individual component, at TRL9.
It is mounted to a PCB as part of an assembly of electronic components that is not yet optimised for mass production and is currently somewhere between TRL6 and TRL8.
The whole is housed in a demonstration housing that has been produced in batch volumes using vacuum casting and is therefore not in design intent material. The housings are screwed together because sonic welding is not an option with thermosets. The housings have been designed to spec but have only been tested in simulation. So the housings could be said to be somewhere between TRL3 and TRL5.

To Conclude…
TRLs are an established means to measure maturity with widespread acceptance and use throughout business and industry. It is important, if only to be credible, to understand what they are and to be able to position your business, technology, or product on the scale. To be certain that they do not trip you up I advise the following:

• Always ensure that all parties in a conversation about TRLs have the same definitions. Never just use the headline titles – drill down and define the specifics of your own case.

• Map using whichever readiness level system is most valid to your investor or partner but make sure the logic is sound so that it can translate across systems from technology to investor to manufacturing.

• Define clear stage gates to move from one level to another. Don’t rely on heuristic assessment – all stage gate requirements should be measurable.

• Be clear which elements of your development are at which stage and NEVER, NEVER overstate.
  

Industry 4.0 – Why the UK should not try to emulate the German Experience.

A few years back I attended the National Manufacturing Debate at Cranfield University. Industry 4.0 was the hot topic, and the room was bemoaning the absence of a UK equivalent to the German Mittelstand, a manufacturing base dominated by businesses at the larger end of the SME definition. The UK manufacturing base by contrast comprises predominantly of businesses of 50 people or less. This enormously long tail of supply has stymied the effective implementation of Industry 4.0 in the UK. Whilst the big OEMs and their upper tier suppliers have been able to vertically integrate their workflows, the costs to integrate are just too high for the little lower tier suppliers – and this is leaving a large proportion of the UK manufacturing sector out in the cold.

I can personally attest to just how unprepared many of our small manufacturers are to make this leap. I often have need to sub-contract CNC machining. Typically, the local engineering firms I speak to have a couple of VMC’s and lathes – there’s one such firm on virtually every trading estate and they usually have the word ‘Precision’ in their name. But many of them are not even effectively at Industry 3.0, let alone ready for 4.0. The third industrial revolution was the digital revolution. My minimum expectation of a machining company that is digitally capable is that they can take my STEP or IGES file and through standard post-processors automatically generate cutter paths directly into their CNC machines. The best now can offer on-line costing for basic machining requirements.  Yet so many still ask for dimensioned drawings - their approach is to NC program each cutter path on the machine. Yes - it’s digital, but barely.

But should we be wishing for the German experience? I don’t believe so. What that vast resource of tiny engineering firms has in abundance is flexibility and a can-do approach that always tries to find a creative way to solve every problem presented to them. They’ve learnt to be lean and agile the hard way as everything they do has to be cut to the bone and they rarely have budget to experiment. But unfortunately, they also must make do – tight margins leave little opportunity to invest either in new equipment or in training. Many machines are decades old and run on DOS based programs and the lack of technological progress means that there is no appeal for younger digital natives, who could help these businesses on the journey to 4.0. So, the sector is left with an aging army of brown coat wearers.

What we need is a version of Industry 4.0 that suits our vast army of tiny manufacturers. One that can be achieved through affordable incremental change rather than one that requires the revolutionary change of green field sites and wholesale re-equipping. But what we need first is a concerted effort to elevate the digital baseline of our manufacturers to a level that I like to call Industry 3.5. A level that can engage the current generation of digital natives enough to want to be part of the evolution of UK manufacturing.

So, what could a UK version of the Factory of the Future look like? That’s the subject of my next blog in this mini series.