MEPCA are delighted to introduce Dr William Beer, founder and CEO of Tunley Environmental, as our Manufacturing Champion for June. Here, he discusses the company’s origins, offers advice to manufacturers and addresses the ambiguity of AI’s environmental impact.

Taking time out of his demanding schedule running three companies to speak with our editor, Dr William Beer reflected on the moment that sparked the founding of Tunley Environmental back in 2016.

In its first guise, Tunley Engineering, as it was called, turned around failing engineering departments. About a year into that, a client approached them for assistance with a Net Zero recovery project. “It was like the lightning in a jar we’ve been waiting for,” he recalled. Tunley Environmental was born, applying an engineering mindset to the challenges of sustainability.

William admits this wouldn’t have been possible without the galvanising experience of managing an engineering department prior to Tunley. There, he was tasked with reducing their lead times from 14 days to 10. When he was reliably hitting the two-week mark, he was expecting a pay rise only to be met with fury from his boss. “‘Wait, you’re happy that you’re just doing your job?’” From that point, he was targeted against a two-day lead time.

He rose to that challenge, turning what had been a 14-day lead time to just two. “I couldn’t have set up a company without that experience. It just taught me grit, real grit.”

William often sees companies with overly ambitious sustainability end-goals frozen like “deer in the headlights,” whereas the best thing they can do, he explained, is start and move forward.

He also advises avoiding knee-jerk reactions to sustainability pressures. One of their clients manufactures premium office partitioning systems with aluminium frames, and they were under pressure to replace the aluminium with timber. Instead, Tunley helped them to a find a low carbon aluminium supplier. As aluminium is infinitely recyclable and, in this case, it was 75% post-consumer content produced in hydro power furnaces, it was the superior choice.

AI use in sustainability is also something met with knee-jerk reaction from many. But in William’s experience there is a lot ambiguity about AI’s impact on the environment.

In his book, 99 Facts of Climate, Science, and Society, every image bar one was AI generated. Tunley’s team studied the impact of using AI over traditional means, and found that to create each image manually would have taken hours, but with AI it took just a few minutes.

“What’s the environmental impact of fuelling a person, with them being at a desk, their laptop being on, their lights being on, their heating being on, versus 98 prompts in AI, and maybe a few iterations thereafter?”

On the opposite end of the scale, there’s LinkedIn, where nearly every image is AI generated. A pragmatic, responsible use of AI can be invaluable to a sustainability project, but using it for its own sake is wasteful, as with any resource. “I think that’s a really important differentiation to make,” he said; “Is this a necessary or an unnecessary use?”

AI models have proved invaluable to several of their clients’ sustainability projects. It all comes down to the specific use-case. For more science-based insights on sustainability, visit Tunley Environmental’s website.

tunley-environmental.com