How many factories have you visited in your life? Do you have any sense of what goes on there? When I was a postdoc in the Cambridge Materials Science Department, helping out with undergraduate projects, I was offered a chance to visit what was then a major ICI production plant at Welwyn Garden City. Forget the fact that neither the factory nor indeed ICI exist now, this was an opportunity for me to visit a full-scale manufacturing site, where vast expanses of polymer film were produced. I leapt at the chance, naively mentioning during the visit that I had never been to a factory before. The ICI personnel seemed stunned. But why would I have?
Since then, I’ve been to a fair few such places. To Baxters on Speyside for a fun family day out, watching how soup and jam are produced from a safe distance. (At the time I refrained from pointing out my food physics credentials, despite my husband’s urging, to identify myself as a member of the Government Office for Science Food and Drink Foresight Panel, meant to be crystal-gazing at the future of the sector twenty years hence from the early ‘90’s.) To a breakfast cereal factory on the Welsh borders during my days of researching starch granule structure. That was a day memorable not least for being, however respectable, totally unsuitably dressed for climbing up and down ladders to look inside vats, dressed as I was in a skirt and heeled shoes. Back then I felt I needed to look serious if I was to be taken seriously (this would also have been in the ‘90’s). To later ICI factories, in Slough for paint and Teeside for more polymer films produced at phenomenal speeds….And so on.
However, impressive though large machinery is, and interesting though it is to see production lines, have I ever really stopped to think about manufacturing as a ‘thing’? Of course, the answer is no, not really. So much of what surrounds us it is all too easy to take for granted until it goes wrong (think of the glass vial shortage when there was a pressing need for them to store vaccines during the pandemic). Supply chains matter. Where some vital component comes from to complete an everyday product, suddenly becomes important when the Suez Canal gets blocked by a ship making a mess of a tricky manoeuvre. This we discovered the hard way during our house refurbishment, when all the replacement, fire-proof doors needed for our house renovation got stuck on the wrong side of the Canal. Who knew doors came from the other side of the world?
So, if you are in the same position of not having given manufacturing much thought, an easy solution is at hand. My Churchill and Cambridge colleague Tim Minshall, head of the Institute for Manufacturing in Cambridge, has just written an informative but easy-to-read book about the world of manufacturing: Your life is manufactured: How we make things, why it matters and how we can do it better. It is a great read, full of informative nuggets of information dispensed in a light-hearted but also serious way. I thoroughly recommend it.
As a society we constantly demand more: more stuff, more sophisticated stuff, more variety of stuff and so on. As academics we are often charged to be entrepreneurial, to take our discoveries out into the world of impact to make a better widget. But the reality is, there is a huge gulf between the germ of an idea, even if elegantly written up in some top-notch journal, and making something at scale at a cost that will sell and having sorted out all the logistics to make that happen. Few academics have that skillset and certainly not without a lot of trial and error to achieve a satisfactory end result.
Furthermore, these days anyone trying to produce some new product/widget needs to pay attention to the ‘cost’ in the broadest sense: to energy use and air miles, to impact on the planet and pollution. The last chapter in the book is concerned with what changes are ongoing and are needed to be developed so that, as the chapter title says, we ‘survive’ despite our apparently insatiable desire for more stuff. As he points out, manufacturing is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after electricity and heat production. We need seriously to tackle this issue, including by cutting back on our desires – as an example, buying fewer clothes and wearing them for longer is a good place to start. But we can also consider the production of the clothes we do buy so that they generate less (water in particular) pollution and make sure that far less ends up in landfill to rot over decades.
Food is of course essential, but we waste an awful lot of that too. In my time working on food all those years ago, people were already considering how to make better use of ‘waste’ from large-scale food production. I recall a cunning plan to use onion skins to make novel glues, for instance (apparently there is a lot of onion waste in the fast-food market). But all of us, even in our own homes, waste a lot of food. The figures of food wastage that we buy and then toss away because it’s past it’s sell-by date or rotted in the bottom of the refrigerator, is stunning, although admittedly the rotting vegetables probably don’t count as ‘manufactured’. Around 9.5 million tons of food waste is generated in the UK each year, the vast majority in domestic not commercial settings. Globally around a third of food produced gets chucked. We could do so much better on this and many other fronts. Read the book if you want to know more about what you could do in changing how you live to waste less of the manufactured goods we are surrounded by.
I hope I’ve whetted your appetite. It’s an entertaining and informative book. Having talked to Tim during the writing process, I know he worried if he had got the balance right between being too technical and too ‘popular’. I’d say he’s found a pretty happy medium.
