Veit Attends Faculty Development Workshop to Bolster Sustainability Efforts at CSI

The World Bank predicts that global annual waste generation will have reached 3.4 billion tonnes by 2050. That’s almost a 75 percent increase on the 2 billion tons we generate today. Building a circular economy will play a crucial role in reducing this forecast. Here, Mats W Lundberg, head of sustainability at global engineering group Sandvik, looks at why circularity needs to be considered from the initial design process; otherwise, it’s already too late. Product lifecycles traditionally follow a linear economy, where materials are transformed into products that are then used and thrown away in a ‘take-make-waste approach. This is unsustainable. The primary principle of a circular economy is keeping assets in use to create a responsible way of using resources while reducing waste. Circularity is crucial in closing the loop of product life cycles.

The proof was on the shovel. The darkest, most porous soil Derek Axten had ever seen was on the land of a North Dakota rancher in roughly 2010. It was nothing like the dry and lumpy, light brown soil on his farm near Minton. Axten says he had one question: “What do I got to do? What management changes do I got to make?”

Every year, as a part of Stena AB annual report, Stena Bulk assembles an expansive Sustainability Report that tracks emissions and vessel efficiency across its entire fleet. It goes out not only to company management, but also regulators and international agencies. You and your teams may have just finished assembling a similar one. If so, then you’ll know that each report depends on thousands of points of individual data, with almost every one found in a separate document or format. It means endless hours and weeks of late nights  combing through PDFs, Excel sheets, and emails. For years, this process has been a fixture of life in the office, but thankfully, it doesn’t have to be that way. With Orbit’s machine learning and reporting capabilities, it’s possible to reduce the time you and your teams spend assembling reports to a fraction of what it is now. In fact, using Orbit Stena Bulk significantly decreased the time they spent generating Sustainability Reports.