• Question: Are you worried about your works enviromental impact? Do you try and reduce your carbon footprint?

    Asked by laceyc to Amit, Emily, Joanne, Martin, Paige on 14 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Emily Bullen

      Emily Bullen answered on 11 Mar 2012:

      Very much so! A big part of my job is to make sure we don’t spill anything nasty into the air, the water or the soil. There are very strict rules that tell us what we are allowed to let out in our waste, and I do the calculations to make sure we stick to them. If there’s a risk of us going over the limits, I’ll also look into what technology we can use to clean up before it is released into the environment. 
      Carbon footprint is a slightly different matter, but definitely a relevant one. My company has recently put in a plant that uses stuff that would otherwise have been waste (steam, solvents) to transform them into energy and reduce our energy consumption and therefore carbon footprint. 

    • Photo: Paige Brown

      Paige Brown answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      Absolutely!!!

      Engineers who work in nanomedicine are increasingly aware that these nanoparticles that we use for various applications have to be going ‘somewhere’ when we are finished using them. The possibility that nanoparticles could have effects on health and the environment has brought about whole new fields of study called nano-toxicology and environmental nanotechnology. The good news is, though, that nanotechnology is all around us naturally. Buckyballs, nanostructures made out of carbon, have even been found in space! http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/02/24/nasa-detects-solid-buckyballs-in-space/

      Personally, I try to reduce my carbon footprint, because I believe that individuals can and should make a serious effort to reduce carbon emissions and thus help save our planet from the dangerous impacts of global warming. I ride a bicylcle to school and work, and I try to minimize the electricity and gas that I use at home! Someday, I would like to build a home that is powered from renewable sources (by installing solar panels on my roof!)

    • Photo: Joanne Davies

      Joanne Davies answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      We try to control and reduce our impact on the environment, by setting objectives and targets to continually improve our performance. There are many ways we do this, from eliminating waste, reducing energy consumption and recycling paper to lift shares and sensored low power lighting in the offices.

      Many companies use standards because these set some basic rules to help.
      These standards are common in industry and are recognised all over the world.
      ISO 14000 is the family of standards that cover different areas of environmental management.

      We can also get a certificate to put on the wall, to show we have done everything we can to help.

    • Photo: Amit Pujari

      Amit Pujari answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      Yes!
      Environmental impact: we try to minimise this by using energy efficiently (especially electricity and water), by recycling most of the things which we can. We try use those materials in our devices which will do the least damage to our environment. But I think, in engineering, you need to find an optimal solution between ‘producing something that works’ and ‘also has less environmental impact’.

    • Photo: Martin Wallace

      Martin Wallace answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      The effect we have on the environment is a very important concern. Something our company does is to recycle as much as we can, we have lots of different bins for all the different sorts of waste we have, such as packaging materials and scrap metal. We have to sort out the metal into different types so that they can be easily melted down and made into new products.
      Another thing we do is to make sure everything can be packaged as small as possible, meaning we can fit more products in a lorry or van at one time, this means there will be less trips.
      Another way we help the environment is by buying as many supplies from this country as possible. This means the raw materials travel a shorter distance to get tous, meaning less fuel being consumed. Then we try our best to sell our products to hospitals and surgeries close to us, so that the distance each bed or piece of equipment is reduced, saving even more fuel.

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