We’ve heard a lot about climate change and the news has not been good. In fact, 2024 was the hottest year on record and to make things more ominous, it was also the first year that exceeded a 1.5-degree Celsius increase since preindustrial times. This is notable because many climate scientists have flagged this as the mark where the risks increase for extreme weather.
This change has been accelerating and it’s no coincidence that, in recent decades, population growth and an escalating demand for goods and services have led to a sharp increase in energy use, resulting in a higher collective carbon footprint. Annual global greenhouse gas emissions have surged by 50 percent over the past 30 years. Plastic pollution has also increased, resulting in social and economic costs totalling US $600 billion at the end of 2023.
As the 2023 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pointed out, as captured in the Washington Post: “Humanity will run up against ‘hard limits’ to adaptation. Temperatures will get too high to grow many staple crops. Droughts will become so severe that even the strongest water conservation measures can’t compensate. In a world that has warmed roughly 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit)—where humanity appears to be headed—the harsh physical realities of climate change will be deadly for countless plants, animals, and people.”
Here’s what we know: If we continue the way we’re going, we can’t maintain Earth’s ecosystems or life as we know it. And if harmful processes persist unchanged, many experts predict that we will run out of fossil fuels, the atmosphere will be damaged irreparably, and numerous animal species will become extinct.
Sustainable manufacturing is critical to alter the negative direction our global climate seems to be taking, because industry and the environment are connected. There are also myriad business cases to consider, because adopting clean practices will cut costs and waste. And in this vein, companies can respond to changing consumer preferences who want to support planet-friendly ventures. Manufacturers can safeguard their reputations and promote long-term business viability. The big-picture win is that sustainable manufacturing addresses global issues like climate change and plastic pollution.
That means looking at new ways to manufacture and asking ourselves, ‘what we are going to do?’ As the age-old saying goes, “necessity is the mother of invention.” When you have brilliant chemists working on some of the manufacturing industry’s most pressing challenges, you can get results that could change everything.
Today, the innovation taking place in the manufacturing sector is something to really get excited about. Chemists in a lab at Rice University in Houston, Texas have developed a new method that could transform the synthesis of high-quality, solid-state materials into a much greener process. The technique is called flash-within-flash Joule heating (FWF) that delivers a cleaner, faster, and more sustainable manufacturing process. The findings of the lab work were published in the journal Nature Chemistry in August 2024.
FWF is turning heads because conventional processes used to build a complex product from basic components take a lot of time and energy. And, beyond time and energy, these processes usually produce harmful byproducts and waste. But FWF makes gram-scale production of a variety of diverse compounds possible in mere seconds. This translates into significant reductions in energy, water consumption, and greenhouse gas emission—over 50 percent, according to the Rice University report.
Not only this does provide a potential new way to push the chemistry involved in manufacturing forward, the promising savings of the FWF technique set a new standard for sustainable manufacturing. That’s in large part due to how the process works. It is based on finding a quicker way to heat things up by passing a current through moderately resistive material. By doing this, researchers were able to quickly heat the material to more than 3,000 degrees Celsius (over 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit). At this temperature, they were able to transform the material into other substances, all while reducing the energy needed and environment-damaging gasses produced.
This breakthrough builds on previous experiments at the Rice lab that focused on waste disposal and upcycling applications with flash Joule heating. And the good news is that, when compared to commercially available materials, it appears that FWF products can offer comparable, or even superior, electronic characteristics and performance.
The process seems to have the most direct impact on manufacturing nanoelectronic devices. In broad strokes, nanoelectronics refers to devices on the scale of a few nanometers—approaching the physical limits of ‘small’ due to very nature of matter—where the efficiency of the energy used and the calculating power they produce can be optimized. Our ability to reliably manufacture devices on this scale would be a game changer. The applications would be far-reaching, benefiting computing, communications, and health sciences, and probably so many more fields than we can imagine now.
Ultimately, all these advances will also impact our capabilities to explore space. Nanotechnology and nanodevices offer the prospect of getting more out of smaller—and importantly, lighter—materials. Nano wiring, for example, can reduce the weight of wiring aboard spacecraft. While that may not sound like a big deal, when it comes to space travel, every reduction in weight can increase the overall capacity of the craft.
Beyond this specific breakthrough, there are also other examples of manufacturers finding ways to make existing products more sustainable. Among these is manufacturing giant 3M. The company has more than 55,000 production lines which include ubiquitous products like Scotch tape and Post-it notes. With a manufacturing base that is so broad, materials like carbon, water, and plastics are all used prolifically. And while the company has a long history in manufacturing many products from these materials, it is also looking at what can be done to reduce the impact of manufacturing on the environment. One example is bubble wrap.
As Sustainability Magazine reports, 3M took a hard look at this product and found a way to make the once plastic product out of recycled paper that can be stretched and wrapped around a breakable item and then shipped. Once the item is delivered, the paper can easily be recycled like any paper product.
Another path toward sustainability in manufacturing is rethinking not only how things are made, but how they are consumed and can be used again. Companies across many different industry sectors are transitioning toward more circular business models where resources are used more efficiently. Projections from the U.N. Environment Programme suggest that by 2040, this shift could create a savings of more than US $4.5 trillion.
In a circular economy, as explained in this 2024 Science Direct paper, products at the end-of-life stage or byproducts of manufacturing can be used in different ways to create different products. This reduces the need to extract raw materials from the Earth, and it can help businesses in manufacturing by reducing waste and improving efficiency. An example of putting this into practice comes from Belgium where an original equipment manufacturer keeps ownership of their products by renting them out to consumers, particularly those who could not afford to own them outright and then retrieve them once they have reached end-of-life stage. The company, BSH, established 10-year rentals at a discounted rate and picks the appliances up once they reach the end of the rental contract to be used in future manufacturing.
Electric vehicle batteries are also excellent candidates for the circular approach to manufacturing. Right now, while the batteries help power cleaner cars, the process that goes into making them is not that clean. One of the bigger reasons for that is the mining of the raw materials required to make them. Recycling could be a game-changer here.
BMW is planning to do this by building a Cell Recycling Competence Center in Germany, Auto Week reports. The goal is to create an automated mechanical approach to recycling. Markus Fallböhmer, Senior Vice President of Battery Production at BMW, talks about the importance of this: “The new Cell Recycling Competence Center brings another element to our in-house expertise. From development and pilot production to recycling, we are creating a closed loop for battery cells, taking advantage of the short distances between our Competence Centers in Bavaria.”
But these are still early days for EV batteries in general and while innovations are starting to take shape, they will not be fully realized until that critical mass of consumers is reached. Brandon Tracy, a former mineral policy analyst with the Congressional Research Service, talks about the potential of recycling EV batteries in America. “What I do love about the whole EV battery recycling conversation: how often do we start a conversation in corporate America with, ‘How are we gonna recycle this thing?’” Tracy tells Trellis (formerly GreenBiz). “It’s a beautiful realization that we’ve screwed up in the past, not starting at the lifecycle and saying, ‘What are we gonna do here?’”
Innovation to make manufacturing more sustainable is taking place. What will drive it further is the need that comes from both inside the industry to uplevel their processes and from customers expecting these solutions.
