ICT Symposium Review: Sustainability and the Circular Economy

Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

It was pleasant autumnal weather as we made our way once again to Meriden, the nominal centre of England, for the 2025 Annual Symposium of the Institute of Circuit Technology. Delegates were welcomed by technical director Emma Hudson who introduced and moderated a skilfully coordinated programme, focused on the highly relevant theme of sustainability.

The opening presentation was delivered by father-and-son duo Jonathan and Max Barrett from Sustainable Engineering, sharing their insights on how the manufacturing industry is evolving to be more circular and sustainable.

Jonathan Barrett founded the Sustainable Engineering Alliance, which brought together a group of organisations that have committed their corporate brands and technologies to building a better world by reducing the environmental impact of the products manufactured by OEMs ranging from aerospace and automotive through to medical and consumer products. Max Barrett had previously been a journalist and filmmaker, and is helping to facilitate the content that his father is producing within the industry, gathering case-study information on sustainability and sharing it through public forums.

The Barretts are on a journey to identify the most forward-looking sustainable technologies, products, services and materials, and to assemble a comprehensive database to present to tens of thousands of design engineers world-wide.

Jonathan Barrett began with an overview of the regulatory frameworks and standards affecting manufacturing industry, together with their compliance timelines, and continued with descriptions of a series of case studies that have given opportunities to examine the core pillars driving sustainable design and circular economy.

He commented on the prevalence of “greenwashing,” the tendency of certain companies to overstate their achievements and to portray a misleading image of their environmental responsibility without being able to back their claims with data.

The Barretts took turns discussing an extensive series of key topics, including reduction of embodied carbon, durability, functional efficiency, minimisation, weight reduction, integration, reliability, recovery, repairability, repurposing, and maintainability, with specific examples and meaningful one-liners: "Repair is the first line of defence against waste" and "Maintenance should be intuitive, not a puzzle to solve."

Smart design reduces manufacturing complexity and production costs while improving product quality and reliability. Combining functions reduces part count and complexity, particularly where the combined functionality exceeds the sum of the individual parts. Durability is about maintaining performance and reliability, not just lasting longer.

And whereas the importance of design-for-assembly has long been recognised, design-for-disassembly is becoming an equally significant consideration. 

Materials recovery reduces virgin material demand and supports circular supply chains. An example of the creative redeployment of products and components in new contexts is the repurposing of decommissioned wind turbine blades into sustainable infrastructure.

Sustainable packaging protects products effectively while minimising environmental impact and supporting circularity. Smart logistics reduces emissions and improved efficiency, while weight reduction gives the benefits of improved efficiency in transport and aerospace.

On the specific topic of functional efficiency, the discussion focused on electric motors and the delivery of maximum performance with minimal input. It is estimated that 45% of the world’s electricity is converted into motion by motors, with an increasing emphasis on reducing energy consumption by improving their efficiency. Efficiency levels of electric motors are classified on a scale from IE1 “standard efficiency” to IE5. Max Barrett reported that a new generation of magnet-free synchronous reluctance motor technology offered IE6 “hyper-efficiency,” with a 20% reduction in energy losses against comparable IE5 motors.

As an illustration of minimisation, Jonathan Barrett described how a titanium USB-C port for a smartphone can be 3D-printed to be thinner and stronger, while using 33% less material than a conventional forging process.

An amusing, but very effective example of practical energy saving described by Max Barrett was the use of a robotic dog in a Mercedes-Benz factory to “sniff-out” compressed air leaks, enabling them to be promptly repaired, which significantly reduces the plant’s energy consumption.

“How sustainable is my product?” Jonathan Barrett concluded the presentation by running a live online lifecycle assessment with a free-of-charge tool named EcoScan. He chose at random an electric kettle as his subject and simply responded to the prompts of an AI consultant to receive a meaningful screening-level product impact assessment report, together with a bill of materials and a list of key next steps—a convincing example of the sort of facility that is increasingly becoming freely available.

Energy Transitions

An energy transition is a broad shift in technologies and behaviours needed to replace one source of energy with another. Dr. Steven Fawkes from ZPN Energy gave a historical perspective on energy transitions, discussed the changes currently being experienced, and offered some grounds for optimism in the future.

His example of a pre-industrial energy system was a water wheel, and the first energy transition was to coal, which had powered the industrial revolution, turned Britain into the first urban nation and was the industry that made almost all others possible. The second energy transition began in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, when Edwin L. Drake struck "rock oil" and started the oil rush in America. The third energy transition was to natural gas in the 1970s, and the 2000s saw the beginnings of the present transition to renewables. 

The last 25 years have seen a dramatic fall in the costs of renewables and storage. Fawkes’ graphs showed a 99.6% decrease in the global price of solar photovoltaic modules since 1980, an 80% decrease in the global cost of wind installation since 1984, and a 99% decrease in the global price of battery cells since 1991. Consequently, renewables are now beating the incumbents by substantial margins.

Solar is currently the largest source of electricity capacity globally, and the boom in Chinese production of solar panels has saturated the global market. They have become so cheap they are actually being used as garden fences in the Netherlands and Germany—perhaps not as efficient as rooftop panels, but offset by significant savings in scaffolding and labour costs.

Fawkes looked into the next 25 years. The fifth energy transition has started and is accelerating as solar and battery prices continue to fall. In the next stage of the transition, the focus will be on electrification, distributed energy, and small-scale close-to-the-point-of-use energy systems.

The old electricity market is centralised, predictable, and vertically integrated, with the energy flowing one way, from generation to end customer. The electricity market is currently in transition to a distributed, flexible, horizontally-networked, multi-directional, cross-vector system. Consumers are becoming “prosumers,” able to both consume and produce, and every building could be a battery and a power station.

So what will that mean for us? Fawkes referred to recent decisions by Ofgem, the energy regulator for Great Britain, that would enable every building and facility to participate in and profit from the market. P415 means that by using solar and batteries, all types of buildings and processes can participate in new markets. P442 means that we could benefit from a license-exempt supply of fully traceable renewable power without non-commodity costs and higher export prices.

So, effectively, together with the falling cost of solar and batteries, there are opportunities to use the technology and the regulatory changes to generate revenue. “And saving money is boring compared to making money!”

In his conclusion, Fawkes quoted the American energy policy analyst Amory Lovins, “Always remember: People don’t want energy, they want warm showers, cold beer, comfort, mobility and illumination.”

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