Goal 12 - Responsible Consumption & Production
“Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns”
The pursuit of this goal will be vital for achieving fuel diversification, conserving natural resources and improving energy security across the world.
In understanding Goal 12, we can see many ways in which we are positive contributors. Here we’ve highlighted just one key example which typifies how our products are accelerating the march towards affordable, clean energy worldwide.
Doing the right thing starts right here at M&I Materials’ headquarters in Manchester. As a business with a heritage that goes back more than 100 years, we take our role within the wider local community seriously. As a manufacturer we have taken several steps to reduce our emissions and carbon footprint, helping to preserve cleaner air for people who work and live where we are based.
100% of our electricity is purchased from renewable sources at our commercial offices aided by the installation of a rooftop solar plant. Efforts are underway to examine other ways in which we can be more energy efficient, including harnessing and reusing heat, a by-product of our manufacturing processes. We installed EV charging stations at our premises in early 2021 and have a cycle to work scheme.
We are also putting together a scheme which provides every employee of M&I Materials with their own carbon budget. In the same way we give employees a financial budget in relation to business travel, in principle a carbon budget would empower and incentivise our employees to reduce their own footprint, helping M&I Materials reduce its carbon intensity overall.
As well as looking at ways to reuse the heat emitted by our production operations, we have initiated internal research projects regarding MIDEL. One is looking into the potential for cleaning up or reconditioning the product at the end of its service life to be reused either in transformers or another application. The other involves some reverse engineering to see how the component ingredients in MIDEL can be separated out and be reused, to be fed back into MIDEL manufacturing.
In the case of WOLFMET we already collect up the swarf and powder from processing the tungsten material to make WOLFMET products, which we send back to the supplier for reuse, minimising wastage of this rare earth metal.
