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Asked by abi on 16 May 2024.
Question: How much does being more environmentally friendly/sustainable impact your research/jobs?
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Martin McCoustra answered on 16 May 2024:
One of the project that I’m currently involved in is looking at the recycling of waste plastic using low energy approaches rather than simple cooking up the plastic to break it down as cooking it up uses lots of energy.
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Ruth Pegington answered on 20 May 2024:
We take the sustainability goals seriously and assess new projects against these. Green chemistry is also an area we are looking into; how can we reduce the impact of our research by switching to greener processes or doing things more smartly? It’s important to think about this at the start, rather than just doing the same as we’ve always done. That’s when younger scientists with new perspectives can really encourage discussions!
Our company encourages and promotes employees to make improvements or suggestions to improve sustainability. -
Paul Dove answered on 26 May 2024:
I think that having a sustainability objective as part of a development project drives creativity within the team. Asking the question, “how can we make this idea more sustainable?”, pushes a team to challenge existing beliefs and look for new ways to achieve the desired result. I was lucky to work on several projects in my career where we pushed the accepted beliefs and made a successful change to more sustainable solutions. So I would suggest that all projects and research has an ask for a more sustainable solution when delivered.
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Sarah Montgomery answered on 27 Jun 2024:
It’s really important in my company – being sustainable is part of our strategy, so we generally don’t develop processes that we know will be environmentally ‘worse’ than whatever has gone before. However, sometimes it takes a lot of work to understand which of two options is the most environmentally friendly.
You may have heard that using cotton bags can be ‘worse’ than using plastic ones because making cotton bags uses a lot of water. Similarly, we are trying to replace the use of some hazardous chemicals with enzyme-based processes that use glucose, but the production of that glucose can be bad for the environment due to water use and burning of the fields after they are harvested. So we need to find sustainable glucose first!
Comments
mohammedfaraazullah commented on :
Being sustainable plays a huge impact in continuous improvement, weather that’s using less resources or using less energy. This in turn allows for a win-win strategy for the business and the environmental resources.
In wastewater for example, sludge can produce methane which is used to integrate energy back into the process making the carbon footprint lower of processing plants.
In industry you can have exothermic reactors which generate heat, this heat can be recycled.
In the polymer industry we reduced the cycle time of cooking our polymer (very minor reduction) which correlated to huge energy savings annually.
Andrew M commented on :
It is my job and the business of much of the company I work for. This year is the 50th anniversary of our first manufacture of catalysts to clean up exhaust emissions from internal combustion engines. We’re always looking to do ever more with ever less and to reduce energy use and waste. We’ve worked with Governments and vehicle manufacturers to agree ever tighter legislation and the quantity of polution we’ve prevented is staggering.
Tina-Jaine H commented on :
In the context of a nuclear power plant, environmental protection and safety go very well together usually. We keep people safe by keeping the radioactive material in it’s proper place, and that keeps the environment protected too. There are small details where there could be engineering features which are better for safety but worse for the environment, or the other way round. Like using filters on all the air vents, which prevents pollution being released into the atmosphere, but generates a lot of waste filters. We always weigh up the pros and cons when safety and environment are in conflict, and try to reduce both safety and environmental risks as low as reasonably practical.