Being Sustainable

Sustainability is the ability to maintain or support a process over time. It is often broken into three core concepts: economic, environmental, and social. Thanks to public awareness and pressure, many governments have committed to sustainable goals, such as reducing their environmental footprints and conserving resources. Business has had to follow, because regulations, such as recycling, have been imposed on them, and because some have figured out its good social policy – and marketing.

There are so many ways to define and express Sustainable!

Sustainable Design

The first step in sustainability. It seeks to reduce the negative impact of ‘bad design’ on the environment, on peoples’ health and on their pockets. Specific goals are to create innovative designs, potentially using novel materials, to reduce the consumption of non-renewable resources, extend product lifetime (e.g. by letting them be repaired, as once they used to be) and minimize waste, by being able to recycle and re-use their core constituents at the end of the product’s usable life.

By the very nature of what we do, our products are specifically designed to be sustainable, being as small as functionally possible and made of recyclable and/or biodegradable materials. For example, where the device needs to be powered to send data, our design includes low-power energy harvesting, avoiding the need for lithium batteries.

Sustainable Manufacturing

Clearly this runs from the source materials to the process of making the final product. Again, in many countries regulations and incentives are in place to encourage companies to manufacture their products, including packaging and wrapping, to meet sustainable goals. Performance to those goals and standards can be checked.

In our case our devices are still at the prototype stage; that said a couple of them will come to market in the next twelve months or so. We will almost definitely outsource manufacturing to specialists who have been properly certified as using sustainable methodologies and practices. Our design ensures integral sustainability.

Sustainable Operation

A product must not only be designed and made well, it needs to operate well: as long as life as needed over time for its purpose, easy and cost-effective maintenance, the possibility of repairing it if needed, efficient running costs overall and full knowledge of its performance during its lifecycle.

Our tags and sensors are very small, last at least as long as the product or purpose required, are deliberately made to be as efficient as possible and definitely provide full knowledge of its performance from the moment of installation to end-of-life. The only thing you can’t do is repair them, but then you shouldn’t need to. If a device fails, then its covered by our warranty programme.

Sustainable Recycling

This begins with the design and manufacturing process, and in today’s world not only follows the good intentions of the maker, but also requirements imposed by regulations. The ones you might be most familiar with include single-use plastics – now banned in some countries – or tagged in such a way to be recyclable, such as packaging and wrapping. Some you might not know are the special multi-use plastics used in automotive and aviation sectors – all that interior stuff you see. Then again there is the commercial business of breaking down things like smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops into their constituent parts, this because the metals in them have value.

Sustainable recycling lies at the core of our product design. We design and make devices that follow all the regulations that the company or organization using them requires us to do. Possibly more, because our innovation can replace older processes, for example in having biodegradable energy harvesting that replaces batteries as the prime generator of power.

Sustainable Technology

Using computing and telecommunications in a way to minimize the economic and environmental impact of its use (think of those energy guzzling, heat generating giga servers for mining cryptocurrency installed in places like Greenland), and maximizes its long-term sustainability, e.g by generating energy from wind power, solar farms etc.

Nowadays most companies avoid having to run their own server farms and physical data centres. Not only is that more efficient and secure, it is often more economical. Sustainable is in the list somewhere, but often not key in decision making. Not yet, anyway.

Our IT backbone is Microsoft Azure for hosting Microsoft services, our several databases and distributed apps. Our website is hosted with Siteground, in part because of their excellent service levels, and in part because of their sustainability policy.

Sustainable Us

This means everything from how the office building runs to your supply chain from source to warehouse to delivery. You can add in how your people move around for good measure. The upside is that a lot of sustainability measures and accreditations exist to measure, qualify and certify these, right down to the lightbulbs you use.

In our case we took offices and labs in Future Space, Bristol, in great part because of its established sustainability practices, including waste recycling and disposal.

At least half of our daily work is done remotely, saving on travel and accommodation costs.