Industrial plastics: improving sustainability with carbon capture

If we wait any longer, we’ll miss the boat.

Product hire allows products to be used multiple times during their life across a number of different buildings and applications.This means the product is used more times over its life, making it more worthwhile to manufacture and reducing the number needed, which equates to a more sustainable construction practice.. Take-back schemes, where manufacturers and suppliers will take back products and materials at the end of their life, enable waste to be minimised and known materials to be recycled within the production process.

This reduces raw material requirements for new products.. Minimise impact and waste for sustainable construction.Use low impact materials by considering the environmental impact at specification stage, alongside cost and technical considerations.This also includes the manufacturing location of materials and the transportation distance to site..

The recycled content of materials should be maximised without significantly impacting the technical characteristics of the material..Designing out waste can be achieved with clever and simple use of materials, eg.

altering the centre point of ceiling tiles to limit offcuts to a single side of the room, rather than both sides..

Designing with/for components promotes offsite assembly of repeated modules.Creating courses which span traditional academic bastions seems important, while developing graduates into dynamic, collaborative and imaginative problem solvers is the key challenge for business.. A huge issue that is often ignored, but fundamental to the truism of “reduce” being the most important step in sustainability, is the enormous overproduction, supply, and wastage of drugs in the global ecosystem..

Some medicines are manufactured, prescribed, and sold which have little or no positive impact on human health.There is evidence that medicines commonly prescribed to women do not work.

There is a good deal of published research and perspectives on the oversupply of marginally beneficial, or even harmful, drugs..If we could remove this demand for drugs along with severely reducing the waste of wrongly sold, wrongly prescribed, never-taken and out-of-shelf-life waste, this would have a significant impact on the environmental footprint of the industry.. One of the points raised was the lack of general knowledge about the impact manufacturing and delivery of medicine has on the environment.