Peter Marsh

Circularity provides new route to business success

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From a small island off the coast of southern England, Mart Drake-Knight offers his own perspective on the trends driving the “circular economy” in which products and processes are re-designed to create a systematic way to cut materials use and pollution. Drake-Knight – still in his 30s – is co-founder and director of Isle of Wight-based Teemill.

The 130-person company uses circularity as a key driver for its business of making highly customised T-shirts from sustainable resources. It encourages customers to return them so the materials in the clothes can be used to make new ones.

“Our corporate customers are more interested in circularity [as a business model] than ever before. They are taking the concept extremely seriously which makes them enthusiastic about working with us,” Drake-Knight says. Teemill uses a network of plants in other countries to make its basic T-shirts, which are then sent to the Isle of Wight where printing takes place. Drake-Knight is on the right in the photo above, taken at a T-shirt factory in India that is part of the network.

Circularity thinking in business is part of a growing trend by businesses to make  sustainability and environmental impact a bigger part of their corporate approach.  Such ideas are closely connected to the growing regard of the threat – and need to combat – rising carbon dioxide levels and global heating. Some 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions are linked to extraction, processing and use of materials, with the remaining 30 per cent traceable to energy production

Teemill is among hundreds of businesses globally that have introduced into their operations substantial circularity strategies. The companies include not just manufacturers but businesses in other areas including mainly design, waste handling and specialist software.

But all  these companies face the big challenge of  combating the traditional “linear” or “take-make-waste”  approach to goods production and energy use, in which huge amounts of materials are discarded such as through landfill, rather than reused.

Circle Economy, an Amsterdam based research group, is unambiguous about the difficulties posed by the dominance of the take-make-waste model. “The outlook for closing the circularity gap [increasing the volume of materials that is reused] looks bleak under the dead hand of business as usual,” Circle Economy says. “We desperately need transformative and correctional solutions.”

However many of the companies promoting circularity strategies would counter this gloomy view by saying they are making some progress in implementing their ideas.

Above: Herman Miller makes its furniture in a range of global plants that follow circularity thinking 

At the opposite end of the commercial spectrum to the fledgling Teemill  is Herman Miller, the big US maker of office furniture and which for more than 20 years has blazed a trail in sustainability thinking. Scott Charon, the company’s sustainability manager, says circularity is one of the “three Cs” – the others being carbon and chemistry – that “are becoming more central” to how manufacturers make their operations more environmentally benign. “Our customers increasingly expect sustainability,” says Charon.

Kelly Hall, managing director of Netherlands-based Niaga, is frank about the challenges. Niaga is an unusual business that has devised a set of technologies and materials to implement circularity used by 15 other businesses in three core areas of carpets, mattresses, and furniture.

“Today’s production systems and supply chains are very efficient and effective after 30-50 years of work on lean and optimized factories and distribution networks,” Hall says. “The transition from the linear economy to a circular world comes with short-term inefficiencies and new investment…. For everyone person excited by the idea of change there are 10 others who are focused on optimizing the status quo. ”

On a more upbeat note Hall – whose company is owned by Covestro, a big German chemicals business – adds: ” I’ve become more optimistic that a circular economy will be realised over the long term….. But we [Niaga and its partner companies] are all frustrated that product development, consumer engagement and regulatory change to support a circular economy all take time.”

Circle Economy says  the amount of materials used in the global economy each year – for everything from building bridges  to heating people’s homes – is just over 100bn tonnes.  Of this, Circle Economy says less than 9 per cent is re-used, giving a “circularity percentage ” of 8.6 per cent.  The group says the number is too low and has identified ways to double the percentage over the next 15 years through implantation of new circularity initiatives.

Circularity-based manufacturing  has been given a stimulus by mounting environmental concerns

Circularity is both far from new, and part of most people’s experiences.  Throughout history, once the “life” of one product is over, people have often sought to find new uses for it, either as a complete item or by using its constituents. The idea of passing on products such as clothing from one generation to another is common to most families.  Charity shops – widespread in the UK – and antique markets are parts of the circular economy.

Over  the centuries  metals – for instance used to make statues or kitchen vessels – have been melted down to make new items. Medieval paper mills used as raw materials old fabrics and cloths discarded from earlier uses. Today metals including steel and copper are widely recycled in routine large-scale operations, as is paper.

What is different about 21st century circularity – and which distinguishes the companies practising it from straightforward recyclers of materials – is the degree to which they have embedded into their operations a system to link waste to new products through a “closed loop” approach, encouraging re-use. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a charity promoting the circular economy, says companies that follow this path are “regenerative by design”.

The moves in the modern era to encourage circularity can be traced to Walter Stahel, a Swiss architect and engineer. In 1976 Stahel was co-author of a report for the European Commission on what he called the “loop economy”. Stahel defined this as involving both a continual recycling between old and new products and an emphasis on repair and re-use pf products surplus to the requirements of their owner.

Michael Braungart, an evangelical German chemist, later built on Stahel’s ideas. He  brought into wider use  the term “cradle to cradle” for a production system based on a loop economy.

With his collaborator, US architect Bill McDonagh, Braungart established in 2010  the California-based  Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute as a platform for certifying products created by re-use strategies and contain only materials categorised as are environmentally benign. The institute  says it has certified “several tens of thousands” of cradle to cradle products spanning toys to construction materials.

Most of the circularity adherents have built their strategies around two key factors – technology and partnerships – that are behind any competitive advantage in circularity that they might claim.

Teemill works at the centre of its own business “eco-system” which comprises some 15,000 organisations – many of them large clothing brands – that use the UK company’s software and logistics expertise to make their own operations more sustainable.

The number of businesses implementing circularity strategies – and the diversity of their efforts – appear impressive. But summing up their impact is difficult.

Few of the companies implementing circularity ideas divulge details either about the  financial elements to what they do or of their key technologies. (Their reticence about technical details is explained they say about the need to protect commercial secrets).

Most of the companies  that have been successful in implementing circularity have devised some form of proprietary technology to simplify how materials in certain products can be broken down into useful elements and then reused in what amounts to a second – albeit linked – process.

In the case of Teemill, the company has developed processes to economically extract cotton and other materials from old T-shirts. It has also worked on a separate set of ideas – software related to printing – that enables designers both inside and outside the company to come up with new patterns and colours for printing on new T-shirts once the basic re-created garment has been produced in a clothing factory.

The German automotive parts company Continental has – in its tyre business where it is among the world’s biggest producers   –   championed the idea of recycling materials from used tyres and creating new ones from them. It has also ploughed ideas and money into “retreading” to enable worn tyres to be given new lives as opposed to being discarded. thrown away.

At the heart of this approach is what the company calls its LifeCycle plant in Hanover, which it says is the only production facility worldwide that unites tyre  recycling and retreading under one roof. It uses the ideas from Hanover in several other smaller scale recycling and retreading plants in other countries. The company declines to give more than sparse details of the technology it uses to separate rubber and other compounds from old tyres nor to give any details of the numbers of types it pushes through its reprocessing operations.

While most businesses involved with circularity ideas have developed their technologies ideas solely for use in their own operations, some  set out to offer a technology  “platform” aimed primarily for use by other companies and from which they derive revenues through approaches such as licensing.

Inside a Niaga carpet factory in Geleen, the Netherlands

A leader in this approach is Niaga, which regards itself as a “pure play” circularity business gaining income from intellectual property rather than products. The company  has developed a set of manufacturing principles that allow both for the redesign of products to make them straightforward to recycle and for the use of special adhesives and other chemicals (which Niaga sells to its partner businesses) that facilitate the process of release useful substances from old products.

In a similar way UK-based Plastic Energy has devised a series of processes for using waste plastics in operations to make new chemical materials which are put into use in plants run by a series of partner businesses. The company has announced an impressive looking range of deals in which its technologies are to be put into use by big chemical and consumer groups including Sabic,Total and Nestle.

Variants on this approach cover those companies that have developed specialist – and often highly confidential – technologies to split apart certain high-value items such as industrial magnets or electric car batteries and re-use their components in a systematic way.

The US’s Noveon Magnetics (formerly Urban Mining) operates a plant in Texas that both extracts key materials from rare-earth magnets used in a range of industrial equipment and then makes (inside the same plant) new ones for key customers. Umicore, based in Belgium, follows this approach to some degree, splitting apart electronic equipment in a high-tech facility in Hoboken and then distributing the resultant stream of materials to business customers around the world for use in their own operations to make new products.

Behind virtually all these companies’ thinking is the second key element to circularity strategies – based on the construction of an eco-system in which the circularity business is the main player but depends on partners to make the entire system work.  Hall at Niaga says her group of 15 partner businesses – which she calls “front runners” – are key to “testing and proving” a circular  approach by collaborating in areas such as new products and recovery and reuse systems.

Hall’s front runners include a disparate range of businesses including in carpets  the Belgium-based   Louis de Poortere and Mohawk of the US; in mattresses,   Auping and Revor in the Netherlands; and Koenig & Neurath, a German furniture maker. She calls the key executives at these businesses “courageous leaders…[and] positive deviants who will prove circularity works without sacrificing performance or profitability”.

Following similar principles is Aquafil, an Italy-based chemical business that is a key maker of re-usable Nylon 6, used in products such as carpets and garments. Aquafi’s most important regenerated product is Econyl , a form of Nylon 6  made from routes such as old carpets, waste from industrial processes and “end of life” products collected via “take back” programmes involving consumers.

Aquafil operates a big  plant in Ljubljana, Slovenia that makes Econyl on a global basis. Unusually for a circularity business, Aquafil provides some financial data about its circularity performance, divulging that in 2020 it gained revenues of Euro 161m from Econyl, representing just over a third of the company’s total sales.

A vital part of Aquafil’s strategy is its partnership with  a substantial number of brands – more than 470 at the last count, up from about 300 in 2019, and most of which are listed on its website –  that use Econyl in their products. The brands are mainly in fashion and clothing and include not just well known names such as Speedo (owned by the UK’s Pentland) , Napapijri (owned by VF of the US) and Gucci of Italy but less familiar groups including Spanish swimwear business All Sisters;  ZL Copenhagen and Woodlike Ocean, two clothing companies based in Denmark and Germany respectively; the US rug maker Delos and Medit, an Italian business making home products such as curtains.

Only  a small number of these brands – Aquafil names just three – operate their own take-back programmes to encourage consumers to return used clothes made from Econyl so they can form part of a new remanufacturing process. Underlining the operational difficulties involved in making circularity a  more fundamental part of the global manufacturing system,  Aquafil says it is working to encourage more take-back programmes but that this is “not an easy exercise”. The company adds: “We are discussing [the ideas] with many other brands, but it takes a little bit of time.”

As to the overall impact of circularity ideas on specific businesses, it is extremely hard to point to precise figures summing up the financial advantages to  circularity thinking. But the companies that have implemented these ideas generally say they gain some -albeit unquantifiable – benefits  to circularity through the projection to consumers and others positive messages about their approach to  environmental issues.

Through its Napapijri brand VF is one of the most enthusiastic partners to Aquafil on Econyl use. It has organised take-back programmes for jackets made from the fibre and sold under the Napapijri brand in what it calls its “Circular Series”. VF says the products have played a central part in its promotions involving social media and have “allowed us to reach out to our consumers with a clear, strong message about our commitment to sustainability”.

At  Herman Miller,   Charon has no doubt about the advantages to  his company of its work in circularity as part of its overall thinking on sustainable design and manufacturing.  Charon heads a 20-strong team working on sustainability and which links  with the company’s furniture designers around the world.

Charon says Herman Miller’s work over 20 years on circularity and sustainable thinking has “given us a foundation for the conversations that our customers want” with the details dependent on “their own priorities and preferred metrics”. Charon sums up: “We have built up a leadership position [in circularity and sustainability] which has I  believe has made us a stronger business.”

The corporate world has made some bold attempts to introduce circularity strategies into key aspects to global manufacturing and distribution systems.  It seems that the biggest advances in circularity have been made in areas where businesses are dealing with other businesses – such as in the recovery operations organised by companies such as Urban Mining and Umicore – rather than in consumer-facing operations.

A key to the challenges that lie ahead may be linked to the difficulties involved in  encouraging more consumers to wholeheartedly embrace the concepts behind circularity, and so combat the inbuilt resistance to circularity posed by the dominance of take-make-waste.

It seems likely that until circularity proponents start to offer tightly organised systems to provide consumers with a financial incentive to  take part in recovery programmes – which very few businesses so far have been able to implement on a big scale – the efforts to involve consumers will remain fragmented.

But for all the challenges  – as global concern mounts about environmental damage – circulatory concepts  will play a bigger part in corporate strategies in the years ahead.

A shorter version of this article appeared in a 2022 edition of a research journal published by Walter Scott, an Edinburgh investment group

COVID CRISIS: UK pulls plug on scheme to support innovative anti-Covid masks

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The government has abandoned plans to back a novel type of anti-viral face mask, denting the ambitions of a group of innovative UK manufacturers and developers as Covid cases rise. Among the products  affected by the decision are UK-made Brilliansee masks, which have been tried out by patients and carers at Alder Hey children’s  hospital in Liverpool (see picture above).

Transparent face masks are especially helpful for people with hearing loss and other communication difficulties – a group that has struggled to cope with conventional masks because they hide the wearer’s lower face and mouth. Masks are a critical element of public health strategies to combat Covid and related viruses: medical-grade face coverings accounted for roughly a third of the £12bn the government has spent on personal protective equipment (PPE) since coronavirus became a threat. [This article first appeared in Made Here Now on June 19 2022.] 

As a result of the recent surge in Covid cases, some health advisers have called for a return to mandatory mask wearing in shops, hospitals and on public transport. Up to 10 per cent of demand for medical-grade masks could eventually be accounted for by transparent versions, say industry observers, especially if they can be made cheaper.

I tried out clear masks – made by Contechs, a Warwick company best known for automotive engineering – at a care home for old people in London where my 95-year-old mother Marguerite is a resident. She said: “It is so nice if I can see people’s mouth and lips so I can tell if someone is smiling.”

Demonstrating Contechs clear face maskCare home resident Marguerite Marsh in conversation with her son Peter, trying out a Contechs clear mask

A carer at the home said: “I’ve been saying for some time that we need masks such as this so we can communicate much more easily with the people we are trying to help.”

The new masks include a clear plastic window fitting inside the normal fibrous material of a conventional mask. Due to the difficulty of adding this window using automated machines, clear masks are currently much more expensive than conventional ones, although industry experts believe prices should fall over time.

After more than a year of talks with industry representatives about a project to procure approved clear masks made or developed in the UK, the Department of Health and Social Care said it had “unfortunately” shelved the scheme as “products have not entered the market quickly enough to pilot by the DHSC-led PPE programme”. It added that it “continues to actively encourage manufacturers to develop new, innovative products which meet the standard for transparent face masks”.

Roger Wicks of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, a charity, said access to healthcare for people with hearing loss had been “exceptionally difficult during the pandemic [due to] communication barriers”. The pilot project’s abandonment was therefore “incredibly disappointing”.

Gavin Killeen, a director of North West Medical, which makes its own brand of clear masks near Londonderry in Northern Ireland, said the DHSC’s decision followed long delays in the granting of technical approvals to companies working on the devices. “The whole process has been very frustrating” he said.

The DHSC’s reason for cancelling its pilot programme puzzled some industry representatives, because a big part of the scheme’s rationale had been to help stimulate the clear-mask market. Also – with three clear masks including the Contechs product having received technical approval and others in the pipeline – health officials had a reasonable choice of coverings from which to select for the pilot. The compliance procedures for clear masks were devised by the DHSC representing England along with partner health agencies in Wales, Scotland and Norther Ireland.

North West medical labThe government has encouraged the development of clear masks such as this one made by North West Medical, but has shelved a planned funding scheme

Under the outline for the pilot, the DHSC was to have distributed masks from a central pool to healthcare facilities and care homes throughout the UK. While the money allocated to the scheme was modest – between £3m and £10m, according to industry executives, enough to pay for perhaps 20m masks – it had been designed to “pump prime” supply to allow proper testing in real-life conditions and help the products gain acceptance.

The DHSC declined to elaborate on its decision. But in seeking an explanation some observers have pointed to the large costs so far of buying PPE for Covid – along with evidence that some of the money has been spent unwisely on poor-quality or unsuitable items. In addition, the clear masks approved so far are expensive – selling for 35p to £1 each, compared to the price of a hospital-quality Type IIR mask of 5p-20p. Clear masks of the sort approved by the government have a protective performance comparable to Type IIR coverings, of which 1.5bn were used in the National Health Service in England in the year to June 30 2022, accounting for 96 per cent of total NHS demand, according to DHSC figures.

Chris Endicott, managing director of Britannia Safety, which distributes another of the approved clear masks, the Smile Shield, said: “The cancellation of the DHSC pilot was annoying – we spent over a year on this including nine months on the actual testing and compliance, not to mention possibly hundreds of emails to various ministries, councils, police forces etc…However, I can fully understand the massive costs that Covid has cost the country in grants and furlough, as well as a myriad of other unforecastable costs such as the vaccine program – something had to give.”

Smile Shield was developed by TAD Medical of Bristol, which makes its masks in China but wants to bring production to the UK. The third certified product is made by Globus Medical, a US group making masks at two UK plants.

At Bluetree – a company based near Rotherham, with several clear masks in development, though none yet authorised by the DHSC – James Kinsella, co-chief executive, said he was “relaxed” about the cancellation. Bluetree, which is a Made Here Now sponsor, is continuing to press the case for government approvals of its transparent products, while stepping up efforts to sell its masks overseas.

A key point for Bluetree is that some of its clear masks, called Brilliansee, can be washed and reused up to 30-40 times. Virtually all high-grade hospital facemasks currently used in the UK, including most of the clear masks now being evaluated, are single use, adding immensely to the UK waste mountain.

coronavirus-masks face-coverings-shopsInside the North West Medical mask-making plant near Londonderry

“[The reusable version of] Brilliansee is exciting because we don’t believe any reusable, transparent products exist in the market,” said Kinsella. Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool, which has worked with Bluetree on its mask development said: “The Brilliansee mask [in either its reusable or single-use forms] is as safe as the surgical masks worn daily, safer than if clinicians are removing their masks so they can conduct the session, such as in speech therapy, and safer than cloth masks that are not equivalent to [hospital-grade] masks.”

At TAD Medical, Tom Anderson-Dixon, a director, said that in the absence of the government pilot the company had stepped up its efforts to sell the Smile Shield coverings to individual health trusts. “We’ve been quite successful in getting the products into the market. The mask has had a lot of positive feedback,” he said.

On manufacturing, Anderson-Dixon said: “We are hoping we can move this to the UK at some point so long as we find we can make the products here at a cost that the market will accept. We have formulated a strategy for doing this and have located a potential site for production. We think that making the products in the UK would help our brand and want to make it happen.”

Clear-mask makers aim for greater visibility

Bluetree clear face masks (left to right) Hannah Sousa (Prototyping ) Zoya Azam (Laboratory) Meg Hill (Coach) and James Ford (R&D Engineering)Hannah Sousa, Zoya Azam, Meg Hill and James Ford (left to right) are among the staff at a plant near Rotherham run by Bluetree, a UK leader in developing and making clear masks

News that the government has abandoned a pilot project to support UK companies making transparent face masks has raised doubts about its commitment to boost domestic production of personal protection equipment (PPE) and create a more resilient supply chain.

Demand for fresh stocks of PPE could surge if new strains of Covid or other viruses lead to a sustained rise in infections and hospital admissions, prompting the reimposition of mask-wearing in shops or on public transport.

In the early stages of the crisis, poor planning created a crippling shortage of masks and other protective gear, forcing the Department of Health and Social Care to pay high prices to overseas suppliers, notably in China. Raina Summerson, chief executive of Agincare, a Dorset company that runs care homes, said that transparent masks undoubtedly help communication with elderly people and “given the lessons learned in the pandemic” these should be sourced in the UK if possible.

Official plans call for at least 50 per cent of all protective equipment used in the UK, such as gowns, aprons and masks, to be manufactured domestically. Before the pandemic, just 1% came from UK plants. However, the government has declined to provide details of progress towards its target. The 50 per cent plan was referred to in 2021 by Sir Chris Wormald, DHCS permanent secretary, during parliamentary hearings.

The shelving of this pilot echoes a similar decision in a related project earlier in the pandemic. In 2020 the DHSC dismayed industrial representatives when it pulled out of a mooted £75m scheme to boost UK production of hospital gowns that could be washed and reused up to 100 times.

The initiative had been framed as a bold move to reduce the environmental impact of single-use PPE. The Cabinet Office had estimated that at the peak of the Covid crisis almost half a million single-use gowns were being thrown away by hospitals each day.

As in the previous case, the DHSC encouraged UK manufacturers to develop medical-grade clear masks, to tackle the current lack of supply and to boost the amount of PPE made in the UK. Mask makers can still try to sell their products to health trusts and private-sector users but without the stimulus that a centralised purchasing programme would have given them.

In July 2021, the department said: “DHSC continues to actively encourage manufacturers to develop new, innovative products which meet the standard for transparent face masks…..DHSC has allocated funding for a pilot of new transparent masks in health and social care settings….. We anticipate that these initiatives will result in the availability of safe and effective transparent face masks to health and social care workers.”

Clear masks fit tightly against people’s faces, and so offer much higher degree of protection than the transparent visors in widespread use during the pandemic.

According to the DHSC, more than 80 types of clear mask supplied by different developers were submitted for testing while the pilot scheme was under discussion. Some have gone on to be examined in a convoluted “four-nations” testing procedure led by the DHSC and involving several UK-wide health agencies.

The scheme’s demise comes in the wake of controversy over the government’s PPE procurement. The House of Commons’ public accounts committee said in a report in June 2022 that much of the DHSC’s procurement in 2020 was “haphazard, even given the scale of the challenge in building stocks at a time of massive global shortages”. Of the £12bn of PPE purchased during the crisis, the committee found that about a third turned out to be useless and will have to be incinerated or sent to landfill.

The report also criticised the degree of scrutiny the department gave to contract negotiations, finding that almost a quarter of all its PPE contracts were subject to “commercial negotiations, legal review or mediate after they had been awarded.

Gavin Killeen, a director of North West Medical, a manufacturer of clear masks, said: “It’s clear that as the pandemic has developed, the UK has strengthened its ability to make masks and other sorts of PPE at more competitive prices, compared with the rest of the world. This has been due to the experience we and other manufacturers have gained over this period, along with the investments in automation. When you factor in the resilience you get from having local manufacturing, the case for buying locally has become more compelling.”

A key factor behind what has happened with clear masks is that in the early stages of the pandemic the government massively over-ordered many types of PPE. As a result, some items in the UK stockpile may not need replenishing for several years.

However for innovative products such as high-quality transparent masks, few if any are held in existing stocks, making it far harder for officials to argue that boosting supply is unnecessary – especially if rising Covid infections put mask-wearing back on the agenda

Machinery boss seeks ‘collective effort’ to drive environmental change

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A “green-tech” leader and an electrical equipment pioneer have teamed up to champion a potentially ground-breaking energy-saving fix for manufacturing machines, highlighting how small changes in industry can help to combat global warming.

The innovation could be relevant for 10,000 UK metal-cutting machines that make items from cars to kitchen equipment, lowering their power consumption and so reducing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel burning power stations.

Josh Dugdale, a technical expert at the Manufacturing Technologies Association, the main UK trade body for the machine tool industry, welcomed the energy saving idea, especially in light of the “huge pressure on the manufacturing industry to show greater green credentials and be more sustainable.” Another leading industry figure said implementing the improvement would be a “no brainer” for many machinery users.

The new technology’s main promoter is Chris Rea, who runs a big South Yorkshire-based engineering group and a strong advocate of greater environmental awareness in industry. Rea’s partner is Alex Mardapittas, managing director of energy equipment business Powerstar, which makes specialised electrical devices called amorphous core transformers (ACTs) that are central to the development.

Rea is managing director and owner of AESSEAL, one of the world’s biggest makers of mechanical seals used in installations such as chemical works. He says the transformer innovation is just one of many ideas that if widely adopted in industry could help alleviate global warming by reducing carbon emissions. Rea has started a website, Betterworld Solutions, to encourage new thinking on sustainability across industry.

“Investment policy to prevent global warming…is essential not just to businesses but to species survival,” says Rea, who started his business in 1981. AESSEAL employs some 1,700 people, 40 per cent of them in the UK, and had sales in 2021 of £194m. It has a large apprentice programme and is a sponsor of Made Here Now.

Transformers are needed to change the voltages of many types of machine tools – the workhorses of manufacturing – used in UK factories. The need for this adaptation applies particularly to machines made in Asia, where local standards for power supply differ from those in Britain. Around half of the roughly 2,000 machine tools imported into the UK each year come from Asia, with Japan and China supplying the bulk, followed by South Korea and Taiwan.

Up to now most distributors and users have tackled the voltage issue by installing a relatively cheap conventional transformer based on non-amorphous, crystalline steel cores.

Powerstar says it is the only UK company making ACTs – which can reduce the energy losses experienced with conventional transformers by some 90 per cent but which are harder to make and cost more. Mardapittas says: “I think the machine tool industry will be receptive to what we are doing, so I anticipate getting a good stream of orders.”

The big machine tool maker DMG Mori has thrown its weight behind ideas to add a novel energy-saving accessory to factory machines

Japan-based DMG Mori, one of the world’s biggest machine tool producers, is a strong supporter of the innovation. Referring to Rea’s espousal of Powerstar’s devices, Steve Finn, managing director of DMG Mori’s UK operations, says: “Chris has opened our eyes to the advantages of using this sort of transformer in the power systems for those machine tools that require voltage adaptation. He is 100 per cent right to point out the energy saving benefits …using this technology could lead to significant reductions in CO2 emissions.”

DMG Mori says that from now on all its machine tools sold in Britain that need transformers will be fitted with the Powerstar products, as opposed to the old-style systems. “We expect a lot of our customers will be enthusiastic about using these types of transformers,” Finn says. In a typical year, DMG Mori could sell 100 machines to UK customers fitted with ACTs.

Highly adaptable – and expensive – metal cutting machines are the work horses of industry and big users of electricity

Martin Doyle, managing director of Engineering Technology Group, a large machinery distributor in Warwickshire that sells mainly Asian equipment, says that while ACTs are at least twice the price of conventional ones, “the energy savings are such that a company can get its money back in about two years, and after this save substantial sums.” As a result, says Doyle, introducing the technology “is a no-brainer”.

Doyle’s company has agreed to sell Powerstar’s ACTs as accessories to all the machine tools it sells in the UK where voltage adaptation is required. It will also try to interest customers in Powerstar ACTs as substitutes for existing ferrite-core devices.

In recent years, ETG – which does not handle any DMG Mori hardware – has sold about 75 machine tools a year in the UK that need a transformer. This implies that Powerstar might expect to gain 70-80 new customers annually through the connection with Doyle.

Khalil Zouari, European sales engineering manager at Nakamura-Tome Precision Industry, a Japanese machine maker which uses ETG as a distributor, says two of Nakamura’s UK customers have switched to ACTs with “good results”.

One big machine tool business that has however decided not to back ACTs is Yamazaki Mazak. The Japanese company has instead decided that when selling Japanese-made machines in the UK, it will “design out” the need for transformers by making the necessary electrical adaptations in its Japanese factories.

A new website aims to encourage businesses in sectors from pharmaceuticals to pumps to publicise their own efforts to reduce carbon emissions

Engineering for a Betterworld

Chis Rea – managing director of AESSEAL – says he found out about the energy saving potential of an innovative transformer only by accident. This led him to launch a website, Betterworld Solutions, to promote environmental improvements in sectors from pumps to food processing plants.

The AESSEAL boss wants other businesses to join his efforts by publicising their own ideas on his platform and encouraging others to use them. “There has to be a collective effort across all industries to embed sustainability in the company ethos,” Rea says.

A chance conversation with a former MP led Rea to discover that Powerstar was the source of a technology that could save him and other machine tool users substantial sums, as well as doing something positive to address global warming. Powerstar is based in Sheffield, close to Rotherham where Rea’s own business is headquartered.

Powerstar makes electrical devices called amorphous core transformers (ACTs) that can help achieve big potential reductions in energy use in large sections of the UK machine tool industry. Betterworld Solutions, says Rea, followed on from his awakening to the potential of ACTs, as he realised there had to be other green-tech innovations that he and others were now aware of. “If I did not know [about Powerstar], others probably would not either. I wanted [related] opportunities to be brought to [people’s] attention.”

While in the past AESSEAL has used conventional transformers for voltage standardisation, Rea says from now on all its new machines that need adaptations will use Powerstar’s ACTs. It has also agreed to buy 40 Powerstar ACTs for some £180,000. These are being gradually installed at its Rotherham plant to replace the existing systems, many of these fitted to DMG Mori equipment.

Engineering boss Chris Rea believes virtually every area of manufacturing should accelerate moves to make their activities more environmentally sustainable.

Due to the cost disparity between the different types of transformer, it is easy to understand why many machine tool users have not thought about substitutes for existing devices. A typical conventional transformer for a machine tool costs around £3,000, a small fraction of the price of a modern machine tool which can cost £300,000 or more. An ACT, however, can be twice as expensive.

In line with his belief in the need for environmental improvements in industry, Rea’s company prioritises “sustainability projects” over any other capital investments with a similar likely return. In putting this concept into practice, AESSEAL announced in 2022 that it had achieved “net zero” emissions ahead of schedule across all its activities – adding no more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than it is taking out through offset projects such as tree planting. The company had previously announced a £29m plan to achieve “net zero” by 2029.

Betterworld Solutions features examples of pioneering ways in which energy and carbon emissions can be reduced. The handful of examples cover installations involving for instance the big pharmaceuticals group Glaxo Smith Kline , Japanese pump maker Torishima and the UK engineering company Pennine Pneumatic Services , as well as other instances where AESSEAL has been involved. However Rea, a pugnacious and determined operator, hopes that over time he will be able to persuade more businesses to join the effort.

Riding a wave of expansion, Brompton sounds call for young talent

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The chief executive of Brompton Bicycle has issued a call for the UK’s “best brains” to work in manufacturing and technology, after unveiling plans for the biggest expansion in the company’s history.

Will Butler-Adams said: “The world is facing some big problems and they won’t be solved by people manipulating currencies or creating bitcoin. We need to tackle these problems through technology, industry and innovation. We need to inspire and enlighten the best brains to work in these activities.”

The UK’s biggest maker of bicycles – a Made Here Now sponsor – is planning to move from its home in London to a high-tech £75m plant in Ashford, Kent, that could open around 2027. An impression of what the factory might look like is above.

The facility will allow a big expansion in output with the company’s headcount likely to almost double over this period to around 1,500. Many of the new recruits are expected to be people in their 20s and 30s. Roughly three-quarters of the company’s sales – expected to approach £100m in the year to the end of March 2022 – are exported.

“We want to build a factory where we have room to grow over the next 10, 20, 30 years,” Butler-Adams said. “We need a building that reflects our brand, at a price we can afford, in an area where we can source talent and our staff can afford to live. Ashford ticks the boxes.”

Chief executive Will Butler-Adams says the new plant should set Brompton up for growth over the next 30 years

Brompton has built its reputation around highly engineered folding city bikes that can be carried on to buses and trains. It has become one of the country’s fastest growing manufacturers, illustrating how design- and technology-intensive products can be made profitably in the UK and achieve global success.

Butler-Adams said: “Most people don’t get good advice about manufacturing at school. If you don’t know what manufacturing is, it’s hard for you to consider it as a career. Brompton is a Made Here Now sponsor because it brings manufacturing and innovation to life. Made Here Now makes modern manufacturing accessible by giving tangible examples of the people who do it.” Made Here Now was launched as a forum to discuss innovation and job opportunities in manufacturing and to encourage more young people to consider it as a career.

The new development has a strong environmental theme as the plant – being built in association with Ashford borough council – will take shape on a floodplain, parts of which will be turned into a nature reserve for local people with a cycle path and a network of trails. The factory will incorporate high levels of insulation and make extensive use of solar and ground-source energy and natural light.

Other features will include a visitors’ centre, museum and café. A key aim will be to link up with local schools and colleges to equip pupils with direct knowledge about 21st century manufacturing. Overall costs of the development – including work to be financed from public sources – are put at about £100m of which the Brompton share is likely to be about £75m.

The new plant – due to be built in a nature reserve – will use modern design to cut energy use

Brompton – which started up in the bedroom of the bike’s inventor, Andrew Ritchie, in 1976 – recorded sales of £76.1m in the year to March 31, 2021, up 33 per cent on the year before, and showed pre-tax profits of £9.6m. The company has known for some time that to continue its expansion, it would have to leave its rented factory in Greenford, west London, which opened in 2016 and has become progressively more cramped. Other sites Brompton considered include Sheffield, Birmingham and in other parts of London.

It has in the past ruled out manufacturing outside the UK, arguing that the “Made in Britain” brand adds kudos internationally. This year Brompton is likely to recruit about 100 people including engineers, assembly and design workers and commercial and sales staff.

Brompton’s employee numbers could rise from about 800 now – most of them based in the company’s London HQ – to 1,500 by the time the new factory opens

“We believe we will be able to bring many of our staff with us over the next 10 years before we close Greenford. Ashford is 30 minutes by train from London so we will be able to attract young talent out to the factory two days a week. And if they go on to have a family, in time they could find an affordable home in Ashford,” Butler-Adams said.

The company has yet to gain planning permission for its new plant which – assuming this is granted – is intended to be a showcase for automation, advanced machining and computer-based design. The current generation of bikes is made from more than 1,000 components many of which Brompton makes itself.

Brompton produced nearly 70,000 bikes last year, 69 per cent of which were exported. In addition to its London factory employing 650 people it has a small plant in Sheffield, a joint venture with precision engineering company C.W. Fletcher, in which Brompton has a 51 per cent stake. The Sheffield plant makes frames for a new range of lightweight titanium bicycles. Brompton buys the metal from China rather than other sources such as Russia or Ukraine.

Venerable charity provides ingredients for business success

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More than 170 years later, profits from the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, a stellar event to showcase Britain’s technical and artistic skills at the height of its global power, are still funding the country’s industrial innovators – as 38-year-old entrepreneur Yusuf Muhammad can testify.

The co-founder of Plumis, a London-based company manufacturing fire-safety devices, received funding from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 for a two-year course in innovation design engineering. He went on to found Plumis in 2008. It now employs 40 people.

Not surprisingly, Muhammad (pictured above) tis an enthusiastic supporter of the charity and its mission to help young people build careers in engineering and science through grants and fellowships.

“The commission’s studentship gave me the ability to develop my ideas in engineering and design and then to set up the business,” Muhammad says. “I don’t think there’d have been another way to do it without the commission’s help. It’s fair to say the funding – and the support and encouragement that came from this – has changed my life.”

The commission stewards a fund worth more than £150m and distributes around £4m a year, mainly to young people in their 20s and 30s, to “increase the means of industrial education and extend the influence of science and art upon productive industry”.

The charity’s wealth grew from investing the profits from the 1851 Great Exhibition. The surplus from the exhibition of £186,000 was used mainly to purchase a plot of land in London’s South Kensington, close to the exhibition’s original site in Hyde Park. The exhibition building was later moved eight miles to Crystal Palace – where it stood until it was destroyed by fire in 1936.

Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort and the driving force behind the 1851 exhibition, wanted to turn the area into a hub to promote “the different industrial pursuits of mankind and arts and sciences”. As a result, the commission’s plot of land became home to a cluster of world-leading cultural and scientific institutions including the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal College of Music and the Natural History Museum, as well as the RCA and Imperial College.

The commission continues to own the freehold to much of this area of South Kensington and in 1891 expanded its role and started making grants to young people. Today, around 35 recipients a year, nearly all graduates, receive its support. Previous recipients have included 13 peoplewho went on to win Nobel prizes, among them the nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford, genetics pioneer Sydney Brenner and Paul Dirac, known for devising the ideas behind quantum mechanics.

As well as having an illustrious past, the charity – which operates from a cramped office in South Kensington and is a Made Here Now sponsor – remains very well-connected. Under its articles, whoever happens to be UK prime minister becomes a trustee automatically, as does the chancellor of the exchequer.

Among the people who have a good reason to thank the organisation is Lewis Hornby, founder of Jelly Drops, a company making water-rich sweets that combat the dehydration suffered by many old people that can seriously affect their health.

Hornby gained a £50,000 grant that enabled him to embark on the same two-year course that Muhammad had taken, based at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in London. Jelly Drops emerged from a technical project in his final year – on which his grandmother was an adviser, testing many of the prototypes.

“The course brought together creative people from all over the world,” Hornby says. “You had your own studio at the RCA to try out ideas, plus access to the tools and the expertise from Imperial. I was super-grateful to the commission for its support as without this I’d have been unable to do the course.”

Hornby says the original ideas for the sugar-free, vegan sweets came from his grandmother Pat, who (while suffering from dementia) was living in a care home in Yorkshire. She died aged 83 in 2020, two years after Jelly Drops started.

“I wanted to help Granny, so I started by speaking to dementia psychologists to understand why many people with dementia struggle with hydration, and realised there are many reasons,” Hornby says. “People may no longer feel thirst, may not equate drinking with quenching thirst, they may not recognise cups or have the dexterity to use them. To understand this better I lived in my grandma’s care home and noticed that while many struggled to drink, most loved eating sweets and this is what gave me the idea to create Jelly Drops.” Grandson and grandmother are pictured below.

One of the benefits that come with the commission’s system of grants and fellowships is the chance to join a large group of smart and resourceful people with ideas in science, technology and business from whom a newcomer can learn. All those who receive funding are invited to meet present and past recipients through dinners and events. The commission says it has almost 900 active alumni.

Michael Korn is an engineer who gained a commission fellowship enabling him to develop ideas that led him and a colleague to set up KwickScreen, which makes hospital screens for infection control. While Korn says the funding was hugely helpful to KwickScreen’s establishment, the networking linked to it led him to an “amazing” community of people. “The kudos and connections that have come from our association with the commission have been incredibly important to developing the business,” he says. The company’s London factory is below.

Not everyone who benefits from the commission’s wealth necessarily goes on to form their own business. Many are simply keen to develop a career in industry – or to do something else altogether. Take Marta Ferran-Marqués, a materials specialist from Spain doing a commission-funded PhD in manufacturing engineering at Cranfield University, who wants to become an astronaut. “I am captivated by the idea of going into space. If there is a way to do this, I am determined to find it,” says the 26-year-old, pictured.

She applied to join the astronaut training programme at the European Space Agency but was turned down as she was too young. Having a scientific background would, she thinks, help her in a future application. Ferran-Marqués is doing the PhD while also working at Sensor Coating Systems, a company in London developing specialist materials used to measure high temperatures, for instance inside prototypes of future jet or rocket engines.

Funding from the commission is through what it calls an industrial fellowship – a series of grants the charity is especially keen to promote. Industrial fellowships fund periods of study – normally a PhD – and always require the collaboration of a business employing the recipient. Up to half the recipient’s salary is paid by the commission, freeing them to spend more time on research, and making the schemes potentially attractive for companies keen to develop their employees’ capabilities while also keeping the person on their payroll.

In Ferran-Marqués’s case, the commission’s overall costs for the fellowship – covering a salary contribution, university fees plus other payments including travel and conference expenses – is likely to amount to roughly £90,000 over three years. If it turns out she cannot get into an astronaut training programme, she has as a back-up plan to work in the space industry, perhaps in a satellite or rocket business. Any application for a job – whether in space or on the Earth – will be helped she thinks by her academic qualifications. “Without the commission’s support, I would almost certainly have been unable to do the PhD… which will I believe open up a lot of opportunities.”

She is not the only holder of an industrial fellowship from the commission with ambitious plans. Daniel Pybus, a 37-year-old development engineer at the UK arm of French materials company Mersen, hopes his PhD – involving working with graphite as a basis for new products – could eventually presage a new industrial approach to making materials. Pybus is pictured here.

One possibility is new techniques, based on 3D printing and other emerging technologies, to make environmentally benign substitutes for plastics. “I’m hoping what I am doing will lead eventually to a step change in the way we make products, based not just on graphite but other materials too. Materials are fundamental to everything we do.”

After a degree in aerospace engineering at Teesside University, Middlesbrough, followed by a Master’s in data science, Pybus has worked at Mersen, based in Stockton-on-Tees in north-east England, since 2019. He started a materials science PhD two years ago, with the fellowship covering much of the costs.

“I would not have started the course without the fellowship,” he says. “Almost certainly I would have had to work for a few years to save the money to do it. Mersen was very happy I pursue the studies while working for the company.”

For details of all the awards and how to apply, with details on deadlines, go to the website

Combining academia and industry promises new paths to production

Techniques to cut waste and increase efficiency in textiles plants could emerge from research being funded by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.

Daire O’Dubhthaigh, 25, a supply chain engineer at Interface, a US-based flooring manufacturer, is doing a PhD with commission funding at Queen’s University Belfast, while continuing in his job at an Interface plant in Craigavon. His industrial fellowship could amount to around £100,000 over three years.

His PhD in manufacturing engineering is investigating new ways to increase efficiency in textile manufacturing, using computerised techniques to reduce waste and energy usage and encourage the use of more sustainable materials. The processes he is investigating may be relevant for a range of industries using “mass customisation” – making products in small runs – by helping them become more economically viable and reducing their environmental impact.

O’Dubhthaigh  says: “The funding benefits everyone involved. I gain from increasing my academic qualifications and the experience of working for a big company. Interface is helped by the commission contributing to my salary costs, enabling me to spend more time on research and new ideas, which I hope will bring benefits to my employer.

“It helps that Interface has a strong track record and a deep interest in green manufacturing and sustainability.

“Through the fellowship I have already been able to talk to some of the other people who have gained fellowships. They are involved in a range of areas of industry, including engineering, pharmaceuticals and AI. This adds up to a great network that I feel I should be able to link up with and learn from.

“Without the commission’s support I don’t think I would have been in a position to start the PhD. I think it has put me on an excellent career path that I am very happy with.”

Declan Williams, also 25, is in a similar position. He works as an analytical chemist at the defence technology company Qinetiq, based in Fort Halstead, near Sevenoaks. He’s also doing a PhD at the University of Birmingham investigating how flow chemistry can improve the production process for explosive materials. Flow chemistry is an emerging discipline in which chemicals are made in small quantities in machines called microreactors using continuous processes, rather than in separate batches. In explosives, the ideas he is exploring may help create high-efficiency manufacturing methods that are safer and more environmentally friendly.

Williams started his PhD in 2020, gaining a commission industrial fellowship at the same time. Over three years, the fellowship is likely to provide around £80,000 – the funds contributing to his salary and paying university fees other costs such as travel and entry to conferences.

Before joining Qinetiq, he studied chemistry at Birmingham for four years, finishing with a Master’s degree in chemistry in 2018. After this, he didn’t want to do further academic work. “I wanted to get involved with problem solving in the real world.” The decision led him to join the graduate entry scheme at Qinetiq which is where he learned more about flow chemistry.

“I don’t think I’d have done the PhD without the support of the commission. I have also had a huge amount of support from both Qinetiq and the University of Birmingham.

“I feel that in doing this I have learned about an exciting area of chemistry and developed my own laboratory skills in a highly positive way. At the same time I hope I will be able to contribute new ideas to an important area of manufacturing technology.”

Key connections spur growth for healthcare company

While the Covid crisis has led to hard times for many businesses, for KwickScreen it has triggered a sales surge. The 13-year-old company manufactures hospital screens that prevent the spread of infection and help with privacy. Helped by its sales successes with UK hospitals before the pandemic, the company received a huge boost in early 2020 when the need to curb viral spread in health establishments suddenly became urgent.

As a result, revenues jumped from about £2m in 2019/20 to above £7m in 2020/21. While the figure is expected to fall back in the current year, it is likely to remain strong. KwickScreen says it has sold its screens to 10,000 hospitals mainly in the UK as well as European and US buyers.

Alan Murrell (pictured right) met KwickScreen’s co-founder Michael Korn (left) while a student.

KwickScreen, which employs 60 people in a factory in London, owes a big debt to the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, say its founders Michael Korn and Denis Anscomb. The two were able to hone their partnership and develop business skills in 2009/10 during a £60,000 “design fellowship” funded by the commission. “The fellowship was fantastic,” says Anscomb, 47. “It was non-prescriptive. It gave us an open-ended brief to learn about manufacturing and marketing and find our own solutions for how to operate a company.”

While Anscomb had originally studied maths and then worked in finance, the 40-year-old Korn had done a master’s degree in manufacturing engineering at Cambridge University. After a year in industry, in 2005 he started a two-year commission-funded “studentship” in industrial design engineering, based at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College, London.

It was during this earlier course that Korn and Anscomb met, with the two deciding that a project the former had worked on at RCA/Imperial could form the base for what eventually became KwickScreen, helped by the design fellowship, which was also based at the RCA.

They also met Alan Murrell, KwickScreen’s chief executive, thanks to connections made at RCA and Imperial while pursuing their commission-funded design fellowship. Korn recalls: “Had Denis and I not been based in the RCA’s South Kensington campus we wouldn’t have had so much contact with the Imperial students, and it was after tutoring a class of Mech Eng Students, one of whom was Alan, that he got in touch with us for an internship – he has since progressed to CEO.”

The article appeared in Made Here Now on February 14 2022.

Tech champion plans hiring spree – but questions remain over future ownership

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Renishaw is embarking on a recruitment drive for young graduates and apprentices as a company admired as model for UK manufacturing and innovation seeks to rebound after months of uncertainty.

The company – which faced the prospect of a takeover earlier this year and has suffered from a weak global economy – has made a “good recovery”, according to chief executive Will Lee, pictured above. It plans to hire a record number of graduates and apprentices from next summer. [This article appeared in Made Here Now on November 24 2021.]

However, it remains to be seen how long the business’s two main owners – both in their 80s – retain their shareholdings, with the most likely buyers being US-based engineering businesses. A world leader in high-precision measuring instruments, Renishaw bases most its manufacturing and research in the UK, even though 95 per cent of its sales are in other countries.

Dick Elsy, former chief executive of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, a government/industry research centre, who is now chairman of automotive test systems maker AB Dynamics, describes Renishaw as a “a gem of a technology business” and “just the sort of company that the UK needs in its industrial base”.

In an interview with Made Here Now, Lee said Renishaw plans to hire about 100 graduates in the year from next summer, up from about 70 this year. Apprentice intake is likely to be about 75 in 2022/23 up from about 55 in the 12 months to next June.

The numbers for both have been rising gradually over the past decade – the intake in 2011/12 was about 25 graduates and 20 apprentices. Most of the new recruits will be in engineering or technical roles and will be based at least initially in the UK where the company has 3,100 employees.

Renishaw is a big employer of young people 

Lee said he was happy with Renshaw’s UK-focused approach to manufacturing and innovation. “When it comes to questions about shaving a pound or two off manufacturing costs [by shifting to lower cost nations] and maintaining production close to where we have design and technology expertise, the latter always comes out as the winner.”

He said the company gained “real positives” through keeping most of its research and development efforts in the UK, much of this involving cadres of relatively youthful recruits who it puts through training programmes. “We are very fortunate in the quality of people we can recruit.” Lee joined the company aged 21 in 1996 as part of its graduate programme, after a physics degree at the University of Oxford, and an MBA from the University of Bath.

Renishaw entered a difficult period from March 2021 after its main owners and co-founders Sir David McMurtry and John Deer put Renishaw up for sale. The effort was abandoned in July after the co-founders together with the rest of Renishaw’s directors failed to find a suitable purchaser.

Lee said discussing a potential sale with outside groups had been “extremely rigorous” and had “many positive effects”. He added: “We put ourselves in the shop window and asked others to judge us on our strengths and weaknesses. We learned a lot about ourselves. We emerged ….in a better position than we were in before.”

Lee played down the impact of the sale discussions on Renishaw’s employees. “After a week or so, it was back to business as usual. Our employees have remained focused and resilient.” It is thought a range of engineering and technology businesses from around the world – especially from the US – expressed interest in Renishaw. Lee declined to give details.

The future for Renishaw has become the subject of a broad debate as the government has become more concerned about the long trend of UK technology-based businesses being bought by overseas groups.

In the past year the British engineering groups Cobham and Ultra and the medical division of Smiths Industries have been acquired by US businesses. But in recent weeks, ministers have ordered a review of the proposed $54bn takeover of the UK-based semiconductor designer Arm by the US chipmaker Nvidia. It is also examining the planned sale to a Chinese owned company of Newport Wafer Fab, which makes semiconductor materials.

Hermann Hauser, partner in the Cambridge venture capital firm Amadeus, and a veteran observer of technology trends, said he was pleased Renishaw had aborted, at least for now, the plan to find a new owner. He thinks it is important for Renishaw to stay UK-owned. “We [the UK] need to be able to make our independent decisions without coercion from other nations, ” Hauser said.

Against the trend towards offshoring, Renishaw sees “real positives” about keeping most of this company’s manufacturing and development in the UK.

Renishaw is renowned for having bucked the “offshoring” trend of the past 20 years that has led to many manufacturers based in Europe and the US to shift much of their production elsewhere. Valued at £3.8bn, the company employs almost two-thirds of its 4,900 global headcount in Britain, mainly in Gloucestershire and South Wales.

The company has a good reputation for employing and promoting young people, and for big investments in new products. In recent years, it has added to its core metrology business by developing new types of 3D printers and medical devices called stereotactic robots, for assisting in brain surgery. Renishaw is a sponsor of Made Here Now, which aims to encourage more young people to work in manufacturing.

 

A key part of Renishaw‘s long-term recruitment efforts involves going into schools to tell youngsters about technology.

While Renishaw is quoted on the London stock exchange, McMurtry and Deer between them own 53 per cent. Explaining the decision to end the sale discussions McMurtry said in July: “At the start of this process we [McMurtry and Deer] made it very clear that, with the board, we were focused on ensuring that we find the right new owner for our business…. We remain fully committed to Renishaw and have indicated … we have no intention of selling our shares on the market for the foreseeable future.”

Addressing the longer term, McMurtry said as he and Deer “consider the future of our shareholdings”, they would follow “an orderly process that continues to take into account the interests of all stakeholders”. McMurtry is executive chairman of the company and, with a 36 per cent stake, the single biggest shareholder.

Lee said Renishaw was being assisted by the trend towards greater automation of production processes as businesses use digital techniques to improve efficiency and planning. He said: “We are seeing lots of opportunities due to the growth in plant automation. Whenever you automate a process, for instance by adding robots or employing more sophisticated machine tools, you invariably need better measurement systems to ensure the machines work as they should.”

While Renishaw specialises in selling measurement systems to businesses in engineering industries including automotive, it has also benefited from growing investments in the semiconductor sector. Many chip production processes require highly accurate measurement systems, which benefits Renishaw through its divisions making positional metrology products known as encoders.

Renishaw has also seen growth in demand for its specialist software, which allows machines used in production processes – making car parts, for example – to communicate with each other.

On any repercussions from the UK’s exit from the European Union, Lee said: “Brexit has caused us a lot of hassle, for instance by requiring more paperwork [to cope with new trading rules]. But overall, the impact has not been too negative…the outcome has been as good as we felt it could be.”

Of Renishaw’s revenues of £565m in the year to June 30, about half came from continental Europe and the Middle East, a similar amount from the Asia-Pacific region, with more than 20 per cent from North and South America.

Further ahead, it remains possible that McMurtry and Deer will return to their previous idea of trying to sell out, even though they would probably retain their previous stipulation that an acquirer would have to “respect the unique heritage and culture of the business [and] its commitment to …local communities”.

Bill Whiteley, who had a spell as the senior independent director at Renishaw and is a former chief executive at specialist UK engineering company Rotork, said he thought the co-founders “could considerably dilute their holding over the next few years without jeopardising the company’s future”. He added: ” I would personally like to see it remain independent and believe it would prosper best on its own.”

Sir Vince Cable – a former UK government business secretary and a big admirer of Renishaw – said one option could be for employees to take control through a management buyout, while selling to a foreign owner or a private equity business should not be ruled out. “There are good and bad foreign buyers, and good and bad private equity,” Cable said.

For the immediate future, Lee said McMurtry remained committed to the company, and continued with his longstanding interest in devising new technical ideas. On speculation about what might happen later, Lee said: “We are getting on with the job of running Renishaw…. You can never predict future events.”

The article first appeared in Made Here Now 

COVID CRISIS: Boost for UK makers of protective wear as fears grow of new Covid wave

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A company run by two 34-year-olds in a former coal mining town in South Yorkshire has become an unlikely success story from the pandemic. After investing £18m in machines and research in the past two years, Bluetree has grown into one of the UK’s biggest makers of personal protective equipment (PPE), a sector that shot to prominence during the health crisis.

Manufacturers such as Bluetree have been buoyed by government plans to ensure half the PPE used by health and care staff is made in the UK, against just 1 per cent before the pandemic. Supply of PPE to frontline health workers has become a hot topic, especially due to indications that National Health Service workers could be hit by a new wave of Covid cases this winter as infections, hospital admissions and deaths have risen.

How the government initiative works out will be a test of prime minister Boris Johnson’s interest in supporting UK manufacturing, especially since he encouraged more “onshoring” after Brexit. “The UK is capable of manufacturing [PPE] at a competitive price, and the products will be at the front of the development curve,” said James Kinsella, Bluetree’s joint chief executive, who runs the company with his colleague Adam Carnell. “We have the expertise and the capabilities in the UK to bring PPE into the 21st century.” Kinsella (right) and Carnell are pictured above.

Bluetree – whose PPE expertise centres on high-grade facemasks – is among a swathe of manufacturers that have invested in this area of production in the UK, creating more than 1,000 jobs.

Environmental benefits are an important potential advantage of boosting local production. Sourcing from the UK would cut down on transportation of items that are often shipped over large distances, from countries such as China. There are also hopes that UK-based manufacturers could develop more reusable PPE to reduce reliance on disposable PPE, which dominates today.

But the government has revealed few details of its “buy British” ideas and sceptics question the idea, especially given the record of the Department of Health and Social Care and other agencies in managing PPE procurement so far.

Official plans call for at least 50 per cent of protective health equipment used in the UK to be made in domestic plants – but the government has declined to provide detailsPPE is the term for items such as facemasks, gowns, aprons and eye protectors used by health workers to shield them from viral infection. Formerly a manufacturing backwater, PPE is now regarded as a strategic industry: in the first year of the pandemic, the UK government spent a massive £15bn buying PPE. Most orders went to overseas manufacturers.

Shortages of these items in the early stages of the crisis were widely blamed for the UK’s heavy initial death toll – which now stands at more than 142,000, the highest in Europe excluding Russia, and the eighth highest in the world. Arguments were raised early on that the UK’s huge reliance on other countries for PPE placed it at a big disadvantage at a time when the world was scrambling for supply.

The potential requirement for PPE in the next few years is indicated by data showing the intensity of usage in hospitals and other NHS settings – PPE demand divided by hospital Covid patients – quadrupled in the six months to the end of September compared to the previous six months. The rise appears to be linked to greater rigour in hospitals on infection control and suggests demand will stay high to combat coronavirus and other viral threats, despite more people having vaccinations.

News of the government’s intentions over PPE manufacturing came in comments in June by Sir Chris Wormald, permanent secretary at the DHSC. Speaking to the House of Commons’ public accounts committee, Wormald said: “Going forward, we now have plans for more than half of our PPE to be produced onshore [in Britain]. That is being worked on right now…this is a work in progress to develop our future resilience.”

The department declined to elaborate. It said: “We are working through a future PPE strategy, which will carefully consider how the department and NHS Supply Chain can build on the significant positive changes made to the supply and distribution of PPE during …the pandemic. As part of our strategy, we will set out the future role of UK manufacturing in the PPE supply chain.”

A series of UK and overseas-based manufacturers have invested in making protective equipment in the UK, creating more than 1,000 jobsBen Fletcher, chief operating officer at the manufacturing trade body MakeUK, would like the government to clarify its intentions. “We’d like to see the government change its model for PPE procurement to one that [considers] environmental and social costs as well as price, and as a result encourages more UK-based manufacturing. This would have to go beyond an expression of intent and be based on awarding long-term contracts to recognised UK-based suppliers.” Tony Bellis, head of government affairs at the UK arm of US industrial group 3M, said ministers should “find a balance between giving long-term contracts to UK based companies [for PPE manufacturing] … and allowing trusted suppliers to curate their own [overseas-based] supply chains”.

A mix of UK and foreign businesses have set up or expanded plants in the UK to make PPE. Among the latter is Canada’s Medicom, which operates plants around the world including a new factory in Northampton making 1.5m hospital masks a day and employing 250 people.

The company has set out long-term ambitions for Britain, based on a plant that it says could be expanded considerably. “[We have] the potential to become a significant player in the supply of [health] protection products to the UK market,” said Hugues Bourgeois, managing director of Medicom’s UK arm.

Kenton Robbins, managing director of PFF, a West Yorkshire-based business that has moved into PPE, sees plenty of opportunities. “In the past … procurement decisions [on PPE] have been based on value – buying at the lowest price – rather than sustainability and the need to ensure the UK has a supply route that is resilient and reliable. I would like to explore whether we can play a part in putting PPE supply in the UK on a different basis.”

While Bluetree, Medicom and PFF have gained significant government PPE contracts, other companies are less happy, complaining that their efforts to bid for orders have been ignored or pushed aside.

Gamze Guney, managing director of Global Health and Safety, a UK-based PPE supplier, has voiced “great disappointment” over her company’s failure to win government mask contracts, despite setting up manufacturing in Harlow, Essex.

Medicom – a big Canadian healthcare business – has started its first British plant in Northampton to make hospital masksGuney said she spent months trying to start contract discussions with the DHSC, going so far as to directly lobby Johnson and the former health secretary Matt Hancock. Ultimately, she said, she felt “abandoned” by the government.

Simon Loose, managing director of Rocialle Healthcare, a maker of health equipment based near Aberdare, south Wales, has been left similarly frustrated in efforts to gain high-volume PPE orders. “I was encouraged by the government narrative around local supply resilience, but I have seen little evidence so far that the UK government intends to change the basis for its procurement policies to put more of an emphasis on local UK manufacturing by established local businesses.”

Other concerns have also emerged from the government’s sometimes flawed approach to handling the Covid crisis. After an earlier inquiry into PPE, the public accounts committee said in February 2021 that the government’s rush to buy PPE early in 2020 opened “increased risks of unequal treatment of suppliers and poor procurement processes”. As a result the DHSC “wasted hundreds of millions of pounds on PPE which is of poor quality and cannot be used for the intended purpose”.

Doubts about the likely success of the plan to boost domestic PPE orders have also resulted from worries about pricing, even allowing for the potential of greater automation to cut production costs. Historically PPE from British factories has cost much more than comparable goods manufactured in low-wage nations including China, the leading country for PPE production.

During a period when government spending is likely to come under renewed pressure as ministers try to steer the economy through the recovery, the potentially higher costs of “buying British” could derail some of the thinking sketched out by Wormald in June. In his comments Wormald acknowledged the possibility of tensions between establishing a greater security of PPE supply through more domestic orders, and potentially having to pay more for it.

“There will be some circumstances where we have some choices between absolute price and wider value for money via resilience… Of course we want both of those things—we want good price and we want resilience,” Wormald said.

Luella Trickett, a health equipment expert at the Association of British HealthTech Industries, a trade body, also points to the potential challenges. “How this [desire to buy from British factories] is balanced with future demand for PPE and cost pressures on the NHS, with good supply of some types of PPE already held by the government, remains to be seen,” she said.

Tussle for contracts separates winners and losers

London-based Fashion Enter spent £100,000 making a new range of reusable hospital gowns but in its bid to win high-volume contracts has “hit a brick wall”Two distinct groups have emerged among the companies that have started or expanded production of personal protection equipment (PPE) in the UK. In the first camp are those that have won sometimes big government PPE orders.

The second includes those whose efforts to secure contracts have been unsuccessful, leaving them feeling aggrieved at the outcome.

In the winners’ camp is Manchester-based Globus. It has spent “tens of millions of pounds” on new plants in Warrington, north-east England, and Dumfries in Scotland, creating 600 jobs and building capacity to make 1.3bn hospital masks of different types per year.

The company won a £53m mask contract with the Scottish arm of the National Health Service and gained other orders from the DHSC in England. “We went through the [procurement] process set out by the government which was comprehensive and efficient,” a Globus spokesperson said.

Fashion Enter is in the unsuccessful group. The London clothing manufacturer has spent about £100,000 of its own money on design, manufacturing and testing of reusable hospital gowns. After agreeing a contract with a London health trust to make 10,000 of the gowns for trials, the company spent almost a year trying to interest officials at the DHSC and Cabinet Office in bigger orders, involving possibly other manufacturers that would join in a bigger project using Fashion Enter’s designs.

However the company has now ended its involvement with reusable gowns, in favour of concentrating on its main business line of women’s clothing. Caroline Ash, a Fashion Enter director, said: “We have tried so many avenues to make this work. We gained very little help [from government departments]. Everywhere we looked, we hit a brick wall.”

Most of the orders handed out by the government so far in the pandemic have benefited non-UK manufacturers. In the early stages of the crisis, the UK authorities were often forced to overpay considerably, due to the huge spike in global demand for PPE triggered by the onset of Covid.

If the government succeeds in its plan to boost UK PPE manufacturing, more domestic production could in theory make it easier for the NHS to gain access to the supplies it needs.

Most of the companies setting up or expanding PPE plants in the UK have done so in less wealthy regions, increasing job opportunities in these areas and supporting some of the thinking behind prime minister Boris Johnson’s – so far nebulous – “levelling up” strategy.

Among the non-UK businesses that have installed additional production capacity (sometimes starting new plants) in the UK is Berry Global, which makes packaging and speciality materials. The US company has started a production line in Aberdare, South Wales, to make meltblown, a high-value polypropylene-based material that is a key component of hospital-grade facemasks. Until recently, the UK had virtually no plants making the chemical, the biggest producers of which are in Germany and China.

Medicom of Canada won a £308m contract in 2020 to supply hospital facemasks to the DHSC, setting up its first UK plant – in Northampton – as a result. Hugues Bourgeois, managing director of the company’s UK operations, said: “I’ve been impressed by the quality of the employees we have taken on [in Britain] and their level of engagement. The British government representatives we have meet have been professional and capable. I feel we have a solid basis for collaboration.”

German manufacturer Dräger – which has run factories in the UK for some time – started a new plant in Gateshead, northeast England, to make face masks, in a contract worth about £80m.

Many of these companies say they have invested large sums in automation, cutting the labour content in the manufacturing of goods such as PPE and narrowing any cost disadvantage linked to basing production in Britain.

Bluetree – a UK-owned business based in Wath Upon Dearne near Rotherham – has moved into hospital-grade facemasks as a diversification from its mainstream business of printing. Masks – made using automated machinery mainly bought from overseas but which the company says it wants to supplement with UK-made equipment – account for 240 out of its workforce of 600. Bluetree has also set up a plant to make meltblown as a raw material for its own mask production and to sell to other businesses.

Almost all those on the health side of the company have been recruited in the past two years. In 2020 the company gained a £64m DHSC contract to make about 350m hospital masks.

“A well invested UK business can produce a product to a comparable cost to [East Asia] production,” said James Kinsella, joint Bluetree chief executive. He says there is “huge demand” for developing new products that serve the needs of users better and he feels big opportunities exist in this area for his company and others.

As an example, Bluetree is developing a new range of transparent masks for intended sale in 2022, that it says will allow better communication and be less off-putting for people in healthcare settings. It has been working on such masks with health staff at the Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool.

Suchin Talwar, managing director of Southampton-based Polystar, which won a £26m government contact in 2020 to make polyethylene hospital aprons, is optimistic about gaining new orders. “If the government buys PPE from UK producers it has greater security of supply, while the country benefits from a boost to employment, increased business to transport companies and greater revenues from corporation and income tax.”

Also upbeat is Tarkan Conger, business development director at British Rototherm, a company in Port Talbot, south Wales, that has won government PPE contracts, expanding employment as a result. “Our experience of dealing with government officials has been fantastic,” Conger said.

Against such positive reports are the views of companies that feel they have been badly served by the government and have missed out on large contracts. Among these businesses are three that during the pandemic gained government innovation grants to develop novel PPE – but then made little headway in gaining procurement orders.

While the businesses say they never expected winning government contracts would be easy they feel they could have gained more assistance from officials at InnovateUK – the agency dispensing the grants – to open lines of communication over purchasing with other parts of the government.

In the early stages of the pandemic, P&P Clothing, a Mansfield garment maker, was awarded a £75,000 grant from InnovateUK to develop protective wear for hospital workers[web link-see end of story] that could be re-used through washing. Nearly all current forms of PPE are discarded after one use, adding greatly to the UK waste mountain. The reusability of the products came partly from the items using a high-grade polyester material made by the UK arm of Japanese textile producer Toray, whose factory is also in Mansfield.

The Yorkshire company Bluetree has moved into making protective masks for heath workers and has added 240 jobsPaul Ingham, P&P’s managing director, said: “We had great support [on technical aspects] from InnovateUK. We received a lot of positive feedback from [local] health trusts.

“But we have been frustrated by our inability to get a proper hearing [on potential procurement deals] with parts of the government including the Department of Health and Social Care and the NHS. We’ve been searching for a key to a door – and can’t find it.”

Worksafe Design, based near London, is another company making an innovative form of PPE that feels it has had a poor official response on high-volume orders. It gained a £50,000 InnovateUK grant to help develop a new form of lightweight personal respirator to protect health staff from viral particles. The company puts its total spending on developing the product at about £200,000.

Mike Bradley, Worksafe Design’s founder and director, said he had assumed InnovateUK would have contacts in other parts of the government that could hand out contracts. Ideas that emerged during the development could be handed on to departments such as the DHSC that could learn from them, possibly using them as a basis for contract negotiations.

Bradley said: “It was great to get the development money. But we had expected more help from InnovateUK over ways to use the grant as a basis for large-scale procurement involving other government departments.

“We had the sense the agency felt it had given us the money, and then we were on our own. The feeling we were left with is that the [procurement arm of the DHSC] operates in a bubble divorced from the real world and which it has been impossible to penetrate.”

PPECO, based in Preston makes biodegradable face visors for coronavirus protection. It was helped by a £71,000 InnovateUK grant to assist in the development of the ideas behind its cellulose-based product.

Richard Taylor, chief executive and founder, said he was very pleased to get the grant. After this the company formed connections with three organisations that have assisted with the product’s development, including the National Physical Laboratory, a government agency that advised on steering the product through regulatory reviews; the University of Central Lancashire, which assisted on medical standards; and Lancaster University which undertook life-cycle analysis.

Richard Taylor of PPECO -pictured with one of his company’s biodegradable face visors – has tried hard to win government contractsBut Taylor has been disappointed by lack of success in using InnovateUK connections to create a pathway towards opening talks with government procurement agencies. “I thought we succeeded with our product development and after this had a good basis for discussions with other government departments about winning orders. In terms of how InnovateUK connects with other parts of the government on procurement, I feel there is room for improvement.”

Kenton Robbins, managing director of PFF, a company based near Leeds that won a £18.4m DHSC contract in 2020 to make hospital aprons, said: “I can understand the frustration of UK companies that have worked hard to put themselves in a good position to supply PPE from British plants and now find they cannot win orders…. Whilst not everything the DHSC has undertaken has been perfect, [most officials] have shown exemplary levels of commitment and tenacity in challenging and uncertain times.”

InnovateUK declined to discuss its dealings with the three businesses, nor its connections with other government departments. It said: “We are confident that we have supported [the three companies] throughout their journey with us.”

The DHSC said it did not want to talk about interactions with specific with companies. It advised businesses that wanted to bid for government contracts to follow the advice on official websites.

PPE use climbs above government assumptions

Use of protective equipment in hospitals during the pandemic has soared above official projections, stoking demand for more UK productionSince the start of the crisis, personal protective equipment (PPE) has been used in enormous quantities. Between February 2020 and September 30, 2020, the Department of Health and Social Care has bought and distributed more than 14bn individual pieces of PPE – most of which is used once and then discarded, creating huge waste. It says it ordered 32bn items.

The volumes required show huge rises on the figures used before the pandemic, and in most cases are far more than demand estimates published in a DHSC strategy paper in September 2020 (see below).

Source for all Charts : DHSC experimental statistics for PPE distribution in England; Government coronavirus daily updates; DHSC PPE strategy paper Sept 2020For instance, use of hospital isolation gowns in National Health Service centres in England was running at about 750,000 units a year before the pandemic. The strategy paper assumes that about 18m isolation gowns would be needed for a full year of Covid. In the event, about 41m were required.

In the case of hospital masks of all grades, only about 18m were needed each year before coronavirus. The strategy paper suggested annual demand during the pandemic more than 50 times greater, at 1bn masks. However, during the first year of Covid, some 1.5bn masks were needed.

PPE as counted in official statistics covers a variety of items including body bags, hygiene products and swabs. However, some 93 per cent of the more-than 14bn items of PPE used in the crisis fall into five categories: Type IIR and FFP3 masks, aprons, gowns and gloves. Of these, due to recent manufacturing investments, all but gloves are being made in high volumes in the UK.

How demand for shielding equipment surged as the crisis unfolded

Use of protective equipment in the heath service has stayed extremely high, even as the pandemic’s impact has declined since its worst stagesData compiled by Made Here Now show that the intensity of use of personal protective equipment (PPE) – the total amount required, adjusted for the perceived severity of the pandemic as indicated by hospital Covid cases – has risen markedly since the early stages of the crisis.

As a result, even though the numbers hospitalised are significantly lower than at the peak of the crisis in January 2021, demand for PPE has remained high, indicating greatly increased awareness of infection risks, especially amid signs that the threat from coronavirus may be worsening.

The rise in the “PPE intensity ratio” – a measure devised by Made Here Now – underlines how access to protective equipment has become increasingly important as the Covid era has stretched out. On the assumption this continues, greater availability of domestically produced PPE could reduce fears over security of supply.

The potential for demand to increase significantly has prompted at least one manufacturer to invest in UK-based PPE production. James Kinsella, co-chief executive of South Yorkshire-based Bluetree, said the company’s decision to start a face mask plant was related to projections of how the pandemic would evolve, especially related to NHS policies on shielding health workers from viral spread.

“We envisage a greater accent in hospitals on infection control to cut down not just on Covid but other diseases such as flu. This will require more PPE including masks,” Kinsella said.

In recent weeks, government figures related to the severity of the crisis have risen alarmingly. On November 2, daily registered Covid deaths in England reached 255, the highest since early March. For nearly all of June, there were fewer than 20 deaths from Covid a day.

Daily hospital Covid cases in England have climbed from below 1,000 in May and June this year to more than 7,000 in early November, similar to the numbers in October 2020, after which cases climbed precipitously to a peak of more than 34,000 on January 18. Two days later, 1,662 deaths were recorded, the highest number for England so far.

Any repeat of this over the next few months would, while signalling a catastrophe for the health system, hugely increase demand for PPE.

Made Here Now data based on the “intensity ratio” have revealed key trends shaping demand for items such as masks and gowns, pointing to a tightening of efforts to control infection in hospitals and other health settingsBehind the Made Here Now data is an analysis of the intensity ratio over the three six-month periods since around the start of the pandemic in April 2020 and for which government figures are available.

The intensity ratio is the number of items of equipment distributed to National Health Service establishments including hospitals, divided by the sum over a set period of the daily figures for Covid hospitalisations. The latter measure is the best simple indicator of the seriousness of the threat to health workers from coronavirus.

The ratio for the most recent period – April to September 2020 – was four times greater than during the second period covered by the analysis over the previous six months. Between the first and third periods, the ratio went up by a factor of 2.7.

In the most recent six months, the sum of the daily figures for hospital cases came in at fewer than 600,000, much less than the 2.7m total hospital cases in the previous six months at around the peak of pandemic so far.

Despite this indication of a reduced threat, 5.1bn PPE items were used in the latest period, only slightly below the 6bn in the previous six months. As a result of these changes, the intensity ratio between these time spans rose sharply to 9,033, from just 2,230.

In the first six months of the analysis, the 3.2bn PPE items were recorded as being used, for a total of 980,000 hospital cases, giving an intensity ratio of 3,301. The data for this period must be treated cautiously since equipment use is likely to have been constrained by lack of supply, linked to low government stocks.

By the start of the second period, in October last year, massive government ordering led to supply no longer being an issue. As a result, the amount of PPE being used was more likely to provide an accurate assessment of what health workers thought was necessary to fight the disease.

The rise in the ratio between the second and third six-month periods for some specific items of PPE was also high. The ratio for isolation gowns more than doubled while the comparable number for Type IIR masks – the most widely used type of hospital face mask – went up four times. The chart below shows changes in the intensity ratio between the first and third six-month periods.

The intensity ratio is based on PPE use by the NHS for England only. Detailed data for PPE use in other parts of the UK are less easily available. Numbers of hospital cases are also based on data covering only England. Roughly 70 per cent of PPE purchased for the NHS is used in hospitals with the rest going to other places such as care homes and doctors’ surgeries.

An interpretation of the data for the time between April 2020 and September 2020 that is based on six quarterly periods – rather than three spans of six months – provides a more nuanced view of shifts in PPE demand relative to hospital cases (see below).

Source for all Charts : DHSC experimental statistics for PPE distribution in England; Government coronavirus daily updates; DHSC PPE strategy paper Sept 2020Under this method of analysis, the intensity ratio for the most recent three months – from July to September 2020 – comes in at 5,155, appreciably less than the figure of more than 23,000 registered for the quarter immediately before this when hospital cases were very high.

However the ratio for the most recent three months – when hospital cases have been quite low – was still markedly above the equivalent numbers for all but two of the other five quarters covering the pandemic.

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CASE STUDY: Brompton Bicycle – A transport tool based on craft and design

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From the Dandy horse to the carbon bike

Brompton’s folding bike has been described by Andrew Ritchie, the company’s founder, as the cycling equivalent of “a magic carpet you can keep in your pocket”. It has followed a series of innovations in bike design over two centuries.

  • Karl Drais of Karlsruhe, Germany, invents an early bicycle, called the velocipede or Dandy horse. It was propelled by sitting on it and pushing oneself along with the feet.
  • Philipp Moritz Fischer, a German instrument maker, creates the first bicycle powered by a pedal and crank.
  • The Penny Farthing is invented in the UK by James Starley. The bike, with one big and one small wheel, was named after two Victorian coins.
  • In the US, Albert Pope starts making the Columbia bike at the Connecticut factory of Weed Sewing Machine.
  • Gustave Trouvé of France creates a tricycle with an electric drive – the forerunner of today’s electric bikes.
  • US inventor Emmit Latta files a patent for a collapsible bike that can be “folded when not required for use, so as to require little storage-room and facilitate its transportation”.
  • Raleigh Bicycle Company, one of the world’s best known bike makers, opens in Nottingham, UK. It closes its last factory in the city in 2003.
  • The Moulton cycle – devised by Alex Moulton in the UK and featuring unusually small wheels – inspires a wave of new folding bike designs.
  • Harry Bickerton designs a lightweight folding commuter bike using the latest aluminium alloys and special robust hinges. Over the next 20 years his UK company sells about 600,000 folding bikes.
  • Businessman King Liu starts Giant Manufacturing in Taiwan. The company grows into one of the world’s biggest bicycle makers, known especially for its lightweight carbon fibre bikes.
  • Andrew Ritchie designs a new folding bike in his flat overlooking the Brompton Oratory in South Kensington, London. A year later Ritchie patents the design.
  • Ritchie sets up Brompton Bicycle Company, with production beginning three years later.
  • A Brompton is ridden at the South Pole.
  • T he company moves into a new London factory.
  • Brompton introduces new electric bike based on a collaboration with Formula One supplier Williams.

Gearing up on the back of engineering advances

Looking beyond his own company, Will Butler-Adams, Brompton’s chief executive, says its products illustrates the power of engineering.

“We are making stuff – thinking about problems, solving them and working out how to create the things that result. Putting design, engineering and manufacturing together in this way is highly creative and can be incredibly exciting.”

Brompton has worked on a number of key areas of manufacturing technology, among them new welding techniques for titanium components. Titanium is used in parts of some of its frames on account of the metal’s strength and lightness. Brompton has set up a joint venture with CW Fletcher, a metals specialist, to make titanium frames in Sheffield.

It has designed its own steel hinges that ensure that even after a bike has been folded and unfolded many times the alignment between the front and back wheels and the frame is highly precise. “We have to make sure the parts line up to within a fifth of a millimetre. If we don’t do that, the cyclist immediately knows something is wrong,” says Butler-Adams.

Among the bike’s most important components are several hundred small parts, each crucial to the overall design, that form part of each bike’s drive mechanism, comprising the system that links the pedals to the wheels via gears and hubs.

Brompton also works with several key suppliers that make specific parts. It buys wheels from Wilkinson Wheels, a specialist company based in Wolverhampton, and has a longstanding partnership with Wye Valley Services, a machining business in Maidenhead that supplies small metal components.

Mini Plas of Welwyn Garden City produces many of the injection moulded plastic items that go into each bike, while luggage bags, available as optional accessories, come from Carlisle-based Chapman Bags.

Home-grown talent behind cycling resurgence

After a long period of decline, Britain’s bicycle building business has been going through an upturn, helped by a renewed interest in cycling and the resulting demand for specialised, high-value bikes that can be manufactured profitably in the UK.

While most of the UK’s best known bike brands design and assemble their products in Britain, some import key parts such as frames, usually from China.

Shand – based in Livingston, near Edinburgh and started in 2003 by Steven Shand – has made a name for itself in upmarket “adventure bikes” used for instance in mountain racing. Like some of its rivals, the company sets great store on making its own frames, mainly using special steel tubing.

Paper Bicycle is another Scottish company – based in Stewarton, Ayrshire – which was started by Nick Lobnitz, a farmer-cum-engineer who has also worked as a silversmith. Lobnitz’s bikes feature an upright design and are meant for everyday use in towns and cities. He describes his interests as designing “tools for simple lives and friendly societies”.

Paper Bicycle’s designs share some features with the bikes made by Pashley of Stratford-upon-Avon, which is the oldest bike maker still based in Britain, having been founded in 1926. Among Pashley’s classic “commuter bikes” are the Princess and Roadster models.

Another well established UK brand is Condor, a London company started in 1948 by Monty Young. It is known for its hand-built bikes – each unique to the customer – with frames made by a specialist firm in Italy. Among its products is £3,000 ultra-light bike using parts made from carbon fibre.

Donhou Bicycles, also based in London, was started in 2010 by Tom Donhou, an entrepreneur who says he was inspired to set up his own bike making company during a long cycling trip in China. The year before Donhou started up, Ricky Feather left his factory job to start making bikes in another new company – Feather Cycles, based in Easingwold, North Yorkshire.

Empire Cycles is a Bolton business set up in 2004 by Chris Williams, a former motorbike engineer. Williams has an eye for innovation and has collaborated with Renishaw, the UK engineering group, to make a limited edition bike with parts made using 3D printing. He says he named his company Empire because he wanted to be part of “something big”.

Williams’ company makes bikes in small volumes with frames designed, manufactured and assembled in the UK. Among the UK component suppliers he with are Hope Technology, based in Barnoldswick, which specialises in hubs, brakes and brackets; Renthal of Manchester, known for handlebars; and Bolton based Merlin Engineering, which has moved into 3D printing and was involved in the collaboration with Renishaw.

Bendable bikes find a niche

The world of folding bikes is not just about Brompton. But while other companies provide the London business with competition, none of the other major manufacturers produces its bikes in the UK.

For example Dawes, a long-established UK cycling company based in Birmingham, builds its products in Asia including the well-known Kingpin folding bike, which launched in the 1960s.

Tern – based in Taiwan – makes what it claims is the world’s fastest folding bike, a sleek machine called the X22 Blackbird. Dahon – a company based in California – is also known for folding bikes which are built in China and Bulgaria.

Other folding bikes made in low-cost locations include the Slovenia-designed Bigfish, the Land Rover City Bike and the Raleigh Stowaway.

This article first appeared in Made Here Now in  2016 and was updated in 2021

CASE STUDY: Plessey Semiconductors – Lightening up in a semiconductor niche

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The long journey to creating a force in semiconductors

The evolution of Plessey Semiconductors goes back almost a century, during which there have been many twists and turns in the story of what was once a mighty UK manufacturer.

  • Plessey starts in London as a mechanical engineering company
  • Plymouth plant built
  • GEC of the UK and Germany’s Siemens acquire Plessey, valuing company at £1.75bn, and split the operations, with GEC taking semiconductors including plants in Plymouth and Lincoln
  • Michael LeGoff founds Dynex in Canada , a distributor of power semiconductors, used in mobile phones
  • GEC-Plessey Semiconductor acquired by Mitel of Canada
  • LeGoff’s Dynex buys Lincoln semiconductor plant from Mitel
  • X-Fab of Germany buys the Plymouth plant
  • LeGoff leaves Dynex, which is sold to CSR of China in 2006
  • LeGoff buys the Plessey semiconductor assets in Swindon
  • LeGoff buys Plessey’s Plymouth plant and bases the company there. The Swindon operation closes
  • Plessey announces a £60m expansion, based on new venture capital investment and a £30m loan from Deutsche Bank
  • LeGoff leaves Plessey which embarks on new strategy based on “microLEDs”

    Britain’s unhappy history in electronics production

    Britain has a proud record of innovations in electronics – but has done a poor job of turning these into sustainable businesses that create large numbers of jobs.

    After World War Two, UK engineers built some of the world’s first electronic computers, among them Cambridge University’s EDSAC machine (electronic delay storage automatic calculator) which was completed in 1949.

    In the 1970s, the UK was responsible for three of the world’s leading electronics companies: Plessey, GEC and the computer manufacturer ICL. In the 1980s, Ferranti, another pioneering UK firm, was responsible for a number of innovations including so-called gate-array chips – a form of “customised” or “application-specific” semiconductor.

    Now that these one-time electronics leaders have all disappeared, UK electronics manufacturing is represented mainly by a few sophisticated companies turning out mainly small quantities of high-value products on behalf of bigger businesses on an “outsourcing” basis.

    Such “contract manufacturers” include Briton and Paragon, both based in Bedford, and US-owned Plexus, which operates a plant in Bathgate, Scotland. Such companies make products such as medical devices or control equipment, normally sold under other companies’ brands.

    Besides Plessey, Britain is home to a handful of other semiconductor manufacturers. One of the few UK-owned businesses is Semefab, based in Glenrothes, Scotland. Infineon of Germany operates a plant at Newport in South Wales, while NXP of the Netherlands makes chips in Stockport, near Manchester.

    The area in and around Cambridge has a notable “cluster” of small electronics businesses, many with links to Cambridge University. Bristol and nearby towns are home to about 30 electronics firms – many of which were set up or staffed by skilled engineers and technicians who at one time worked for Inmos, a state-owned semiconductor business started in the city in 1978.

    Inmos was responsible for a number of technology successes – including the “transputer” microprocessor. But it failed to meet its commercial targets and was privatised in 1984, disappearing from view a few years later.

    The article first appeared in Made Here Now in 2016 and was updated in 2019 

CASE STUDY: Bentley Motors – An unhurried approach to high-tech production

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A tale of five companies

Over its lifetime of almost a century, Bentley’s story has been intertwined with that of four other large businesses: Rolls-Royce and Vickers of the UK, and Volkswagen and BMW of Germany.

 

  • Rolls-Royce starts (under the name F.H.Royce) as an electrical goods manufacturer.
  • Rolls-Royce branches into cars, after the founder Henry Royce meets Charles Rolls. The company’s name changes.
  • Bentley set up by Walter Bentley in London.
  • Bentley acquired by Rolls-Royce; production moved to Derby. Rolls-Royce makes both Rolls-Royce and Bentley brands, as well as aero engines.
  • Rolls-Royce shifts production of both car brands to Crewe.
  • Rolls-Royce Motor Cars formed as a separate business, leaving Rolls-Royce to concentrate on aircraft engines.
  • Rolls-Royce Motor Cars bought by defence and engineering company Vickers.
  • Rolls-Royce Motor Cars sold to Volkswagen. Separately, the rival German car manufacturer BMW pays £40m for the rights to the Rolls-Royce car marque, with VW allowed to make Rolls-Royce vehicles for just four years.
  • Under the 1998 deal, BMW assumes responsibility for Rolls-Royce cars, after constructing a new plant in Goodwood, West Sussex to make them. Bentley Motors is reconstituted to make only Bentley vehicles, in Crewe.
  • VW announces £800m investment plan for Bentley including a move to make a new “sport utility” model.
  • Bentley says it sold a record 11,020 cars in 2014, 9 per cent up on 2013.
  • Company announces a sales decline in the previous year, following a big downturn in China.

 

     Where are the robots?

The contrast between the Bentley plant in Crewe and Volkswagen’s enormous Wolfsburg factory could not be starker. While the German plant – one of the world’s biggest car manufacturing centres – is bristling with hundreds of industrial robots, there are few to be seen in Bentley’s plant.

Just six robots are in use at Crewe, most of them in the engine section. In the body shop – where the basic steel skeleton for vehicles is constructed largely by welding components together – about 95 per cent of the work is done by hand, with robots accounting for the rest. In a conventional car plant, the proportions would be the other way round.

What lies behind the disparity? The answer is time and money. Such is the gentle pace of production at Crewe – a top-specification Mulsanne spends 90 minutes in one section of the plant before moving on to the next stage – that if robots were deployed in any numbers they would be idle most of the time. With such long “cycle times”, a robot would do just 20 seconds of work in the space of an hour and a half and spend the rest of the time waiting for its human co-workers to finish their jobs.

In spite of falling prices, robots remain expensive and it would make no sense to invest in machines that would be used so little. While many human workers have good grounds to worry about robots taking over their jobs, the same does not apply to most of the staff at Bentley.

Leather and wood burnish a luxury image

Every part of the production process remains labour-intensive. More than 450 people work in Bentley’s leather cutting and sewing section, creating up to 4,500 individual pieces used in the seats and other fittings for a top-of-the-range vehicle. Hides are sourced from specialist farms in Northern Europe where animals are reared in what amount to luxury conditions – at least for a cow – to ensure they avoid contact with fences and other objects that could damage their skin.

Bentley offers leather in 22 standard colours but is happy to accommodate individual tastes at a price. “If a customer wants orange, we’ll make it orange,” says Gary Lanzenby, the leader of the factory’s leather operations.

The same attention to detail guides the team responsible for the wooden fittings that feature in Bentley’s interiors. To make sure it gains access to the best quality woods, Bentley flies its production experts to the US to bid for supplies of walnut or olive ash at specialist timber auctions. Leaving the job to purchasing staff divorced from the “feel” of the Bentley factory would be short sighted, the company argues.

Rise of an industry that many thought had died

A shiny new factory in Wolverhampton underlines the UK’s newfound strength in the upper echelons of car production. The plant – which opened in 2014 – is owned by Jaguar Land Rover, the Indian-owned company that has emerged as a key driving force behind the better times for the British automotive industry.

The factory – on which JLR is due to spend almost £1bn – is set to employ more than 1,400 people. It has been designated as the company’s main site for making its new Ingenium engines, made in more than 30 derivatives for fitting to a range of JLR cars.

JLR – like many of the overseas-owned companies which use Britain as a production location – concentrates on the higher price segments of the vehicle industry. Since 2008 JLR has been owned by Tata, an Indian conglomerate.

About £2.5bn was invested in the UK car sector in 2015, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, which estimates that Britain’s annual output of cars could touch its early 1970s peak of 2m by 2020.

In 2009 – immediately after the financial crisis and after a long period where the UK industry had lost ground considerably compared to other countries – output was just 1.1m.

According to Garel Rhys, a veteran industry watcher, the sector’s “renaissance” indicates how British manufacturing as a whole has reinvented itself to make more design-intensive, higher-value products.

“It shows how unwise it is to write off an industry,” says Prof Rhys, former director of the Centre for Automotive Industry Research at Cardiff Business School.

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Peter Marsh