Regenerative Manufacturing

April 2024

Image: Accords regenerative environmental changes.

Regenerative Manufacturing: The concept involves industrial  processes not  solely focusing on  reducing environmental harm,  but  should actively seek  to  make positive contributions to ecological health and resilience.

How you can Save and Invest back into your Business

We recently worked on a project with a local environmentally conscious manufacturer who started to make big savings by following these 5 steps.

1.     Monitoring and Review – This can be achieved by monitoring your baseline energy usage to indicate where waste  energy can be saved.

2.     Setting up an ECO-Team helps to drive your company and employees to implement change by creating their own targets, and action plans.

3.     These actions qualify for accredited awards. This not only improves the morale within your company but also promotes to your customers that you are a sustainable business worth supporting.

4.     Waste management is an important step, this can include any type of waste from energy and greening your supply chain.

^ We can support your business to save you money through these steps. ^

5.     The savings guaranteed from these 4 simple steps will leave you with a budget to invest in an innovative technology to further save your company more money and reduce your carbon impact.

Through our analysis the local company would save approximately £10,000 a year from behavioural changes alone. This would then be reinvested into solar energy usage which will have a quick return period due to their high energy usage. This would continue to benefit them for approximately 25 years.

Circular Economy

Everyone knows that the planet can no longer sustain the human population at the current rate of consumption and waste. Manufacturing companies have a great role to help reduce this and improve consumer habits. This may look like making products out of recycled materials, offering refurbishments, or making parts inter-changeable and market this above their non-regenerative counterparts. The current model was created to make products have a short lifespan to encourage customers to replace them more regularly and need to continually upgrade, this is called planned obsolescence. This is no longer sustainable as most products are made from finite resources that are dwindling therefore, becoming more expensive, markets are becoming unstable, or may be more unethical to produce.

This adaptation and shift in manufacturing changes consumer behaviours and starts to put the environment at the forefront of people’s minds. A continuation of this process would help to lower costs of certain manufacturing processes and materials due to their increased production due to economies of scale.

“If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled, or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.”
– Pete Seeger- Social Activist

NDMA Environment Project Award 2023:

Accord UK have been making great steps to limit their environmental impacts. In partnership with Devon Wildlife Trust, their first mission was to support biodiversity through a series of projects including wildlife housing and rewilding. Their second, to encourage co-workers to think about their impacts through projects such as woodland walk creation, wildlife cameras, staff loaned bat detectors, and a sustainability fair. All-in-all, their environmental project has been a great success and has seen an increase in biodiversity and community engagement. Another achievement was for the business to become a Biosphere Business Partner. Click here to find out more about joining. Well done to all the participants at Accord!

Volunteer Opportunity for Video Participants

Following on from our ‘Inspire an Apprentice to Invigorate your Business’ newsletter, we are making a video to inspire young people in the area. We have started recording short clips and would like more video contributions to get a wider perspective. All we ask is fro you to send a clip answering the following two questions:

‘What is great about Devon?’ & ‘What are the opportunities for young people in Devon?’

To make this more interesting we would like you to film on location, whether that outdoors or in your office. When filming make sure it is landscape and only the upper part of your body is showing for consistency of the video. Please mail drop to: lily@361energy.org. Thank you for your help!

Call to Action

• Check out the blog section of the SBR website where there is useful content from previous newsletters.

• Consider what your company is currently doing to be regenerative: employees, materials, machinery, waste products etc.

• Join us for our monthly webinar. Just click on the button below for FREE tickets.

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Big Green Week: 8-16th June

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