Sustainability

Transforming behaviour to align with the imperatives of sustainability, net zero emissions and the circular economy offers the opportunity to create a truly world-leading business. But it demands deep quantitative analysis of the entire lifecycle of business inputs and outputs – well beyond the typical boundaries of a product or service sale. Only detailed examination of the whole system provides the insight needed to determine where the gains can be made.

Evaluating opportunities in the context of the triple bottom line – people, planet and profit – allows all key stakeholders to be considered. And ensures that business requirements are built into innovation that meets identified sustainability goals.

The move from linear economies of ‘make, use, dispose’ to a circular economy which aims to extend the longevity of resources in use and at end of life, to extract and regenerate for reuse, is an urgent priority. The move requires radical shifts in all elements of business, from underlying principles and approaches within markets to fundamentally rethinking product development and design.

The principles of circular economy can be applied more widely than traditional product development cycles and can structure the approach to broader opportunities to drive sustainable practices in businesses.

Adapting society to a low and ultimately zero carbon economy will require a fundamental rewriting of most of our existing energy sources.

From power generation and transport to consumption and all the steps in between, technology will be required to understand and optimise power generation and use.

An increasingly distributed and variable energy generation and storage network will require adaptive and active management, moving us away from the centralised peak demand led ideology of energy production and distribution to localised adaptive networks which match supply and demand at a more granular level.

Incorporating broader approaches to methods of energy generation and storage increases the complexity but also resilience in our energy society.

Biology as a manufacturing tool is the next ‘industrial revolution’. Bioinnovation tools such as gene editing and directed evolution offer the opportunity to deliver the controlled, predictable, sustainable materials fabrication and recycling that can only be achieved using biological systems.

Bioinnovation now allows us to produce ‘tuned’ materials with specific properties across a wide range of industries, from pharmaceutical compounds to industrial enzymes to packaging materials. Biological approaches will be increasingly relevant to emerging applications such as plastics recycling, fashion and medical devices – driving both function and sustainability.

In the long term there is the potential for macro-scale biologically-mediated materials production for construction and industrial applications.