Tim Minnshall
Appearances
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
It's so true, and this sounds like a silly thing to say, but just doing that little exercise of just pausing, looking around where you are now, and every single thing you can see, unless it's a plant, a rock, another person or some other animal, has been manufactured. And it sounds so obvious and so almost trite to say it, but it's really true.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
And once you start to think about it, it's almost overwhelming that every single thing, unless it's a plant, a rock, another human or some other animal, has been made in a factory, someone, somewhere,
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
had to design that thing to choose the materials from which it would be made to get those materials to assemble them into components or subsystems and then assemble them into a bigger thing and then get it shipped to where it's needed and then get it delivered to where it's actually going to be used. All of that for every single object.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
And I'm sitting here at my desk and, you know, everything, everything, the desk itself, the carpet on which it sits, the chair, the pen, the computer, the microphone I'm talking into now, every single thing has a manufacturing story behind it. But as you say, most of this is just invisible. We don't see it. We don't notice it. We just take it for granted.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
That's right. And I think even for very, very simple things. So I like to use this example of toilet paper, right? That's a fairly mundane and simple product. But taking just a UK example, if I may. So the sheet of toilet paper doesn't seem very advanced or complex.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
yet to make it requires trees grown up in Scandinavia and trees grown in South America because the properties of those different trees means that you have different properties of the wood pulp and so to make something as simple as a roll of toilet paper requires vast forests to be grown and it takes decades for them to grow
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
You chop down those trees, you use most of it for construction and all sorts of other good things. Some of it is used and made into wood pulp, and that wood pulp is then used for all sorts of different things, one of which is toilet paper. And so what's kind of worrying about this whole manufacturing system
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
is that even for something as simple as a sheet of toilet paper, it has a journey that typically has encompassed thousands of miles. Huge amount of resource has been used to develop and to make and to deliver that to you. Huge amounts of energy, huge amounts of water, huge amounts of stuff needed to happen to make that work. And it's incredibly wasteful. Now we like our large variety of products.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
I mean, I'm a massive hypocrite. I love the fact that any of us can go into any mall or any market, any supermarket, any mini market, and just look at the variety of products that are there. It's absolutely brilliant. But as you say, because so many of these products just appear on shelves, we don't really appreciate the journey that they've gone through.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
Absolutely. And one of the key cost issues, of course, is transport. And so one of the greatest innovations of our time is the wonderful invention of the shipping container. It's just a standard sized metal box. But the genius
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
of Malcolm McLean and his Sea Land Company, a shipping company in the States, coming up with the idea of a standardised dimension of box that could go onto the railroad, go on the back of trucks, could go onto ships, and you could just switch between them, was absolute genius.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
And the story of how he developed that shipping container, and when he had the first ships running, I think, down the eastern US seaboard, the cost per tonne, per mile, dropped unbelievably, like 90% lower cost by doing it in shipping containers. And as soon as you have that,
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
then the fact that a factory is very, very far away from you doesn't matter anymore because the cost of shipping is so low, it's almost a tiny percentage of the overall cost of the customer. So you're right, by people far away being able to manufacture things cheaply makes it very attractive. But it only works if the transport costs to and from that country are cheap as well.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
So before the shipping container, you did what's called break bulk. You literally had very, very skilled longshoremen and dock workers who would be tasked with saying, here are all the things that need to go on a ship, and we're going to have to load the ship in the optimal way. So imagine the shape of a ship. It's got curves in it and all sorts of things.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
So loading a ship with lots of products is actually very, very skillful. Because you get it wrong, the ship becomes unbalanced and bad things will happen in the ocean. So loading a ship was a highly skilled job that required lots and lots of dock workers to bring things onto the ship and stow them where they were needed. So it was what's called break bulk.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
Lots of things in small units being just one by one brought onto the ship. The shipping container just completely removed the need for that. And so by just making this very elegantly simple
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
leap of faith by saying rather than lots of little products, each being taken onto a ship one by one or in little bundles or on trolleys or on small hoists, put everything into a big box and just lift the big box onto a ship. So this, I believe, goes back to the 1950s when it was started.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
But as you can imagine, this had a very dark side to it as well, because it put a huge number of people out of jobs. So this idea of innovation and advanced technologies and new technologies that make life better, that reduce costs, is absolutely great. But very often there's a negative side to it as well.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
And so the communities that are built up around the docks employing thousands of workers, often generations upon generations of workers. I mean, if you look at the Port of Los Angeles or anywhere in the world, there's relatively few people working there now.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
It's quite incredible that just the standardization of a metal box transformed everything about our modern economy.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
Absolutely. To me, manufacturing is the whole process of making the thing, of moving it to where it's needed, and even the process of consumption. Because by us buying a thing and us having that thing serviced or supported or repaired is also part of this whole manufacturing journey, in my view. And so that great point you make there about a car.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
So a typical petrol car, gasoline-powered car, has around 30,000 components. And those will be sourced from factories all around the world. And we're certainly seeing that at the moment. It's becoming much more visible, the consequences of having things made in lots of different countries.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
And then all those parts that are made in these different factories, all coming together to one central place to be assembled, is absolutely extraordinary how well that works, how efficiently that all works if you can move things across borders reasonably smoothly. It's interesting as well that a car... With its 30,000 components, which strikes me as quite a lot.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
But then if you look at things like an airliner, which is up into the millions of components and some of the older planes like a 747, I think has about 6 million components. Modern planes have slightly fewer than that, but it's still millions of individual components.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
Every single one has to be perfectly manufactured, delivered at the right time, the right cost, at the right quality, to exactly where it's needed to be assembled into some subsystem, to be assembled into some bigger system, to be assembled into the final product, be it an iPhone or a car or a plane. It's just mind-boggling that it works at all.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
Something as simple as sugar. And I love the story of making sugar because sugar processing plants are quite energy intensive. In one end, raw material straight from field or wherever it may be. Out the other end, nice, clean packets of white or brown sugar. In between those two points, so much energy, so much effort is put in to to process that.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
And I love the fact that with a sugar plant near us here in the east of England, it's quite amazing because they produce they require so much energy that they used to just burn off any excess they had, they just piped it away and didn't even bother about it. Seeing nowadays how something as energy intensive as the manufacturing of sugar is an exemplar of the future of manufacturing.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
And what I mean by that is, what they're trying to do is to make their factories circular. What I mean by that is, there's no waste. Everything related to the making of sugar that in the past might have just been chucked away at the end as a, well, that's just a byproduct, we don't need that, has now become something that is valuable either to the business itself or to another business.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
Here's a quick example. At the end of the process of making sugar, you often end up with some very low-grade types of sugar sort of heading to the molasses end of things, and there's not that much you can do with it. But by building a bioethanol plant at the end of the sugar production line, they can actually produce biofuel.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
They can actually start making fuel from the residual, the waste products of making sugar. It's quite amazing. Another example they did was they were producing a lot of CO2, of carbon dioxide. And this was just being vented to the atmosphere, which is not good. So the sugar plant decided, they said, well, what else could we use CO2 for? and heat?
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
And the answer is for ripening crops, things like tomatoes. So as a side business, they set up the production of glasshouses specifically for ripening tomatoes and pumped all their excess heat and CO2 into those greenhouses, making a wonderful environment for ripening tomatoes.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
Interestingly, when they found out that the market for tomatoes was getting a bit challenging, they actually switched to the production of medicinal cannabis, which has proved to be a growing market in certain countries at the moment.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
So again, this idea that a simple thing like a packet of sugar, you're sitting there, you tear the top off, pour it into your coffee, I would never have given that a moment's thought. That, even the making of sugar, is an incredibly complex manufacturing story.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
So this is gonna be quite hard to make work on a podcast, but down by my feet is a 1980s cell phone. So this is one of the ones that was roughly the size of a car battery. And I use it as a doorstop now, okay? So it's a very impressive piece of technology. At the time, this was space age technology.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
This was the coolest thing to have, a mobile phone, a phone you could walk around with that had no cables attached to it and you could make calls. Absolutely brilliant. So they spent a lot of time making the components for that better. They spent a lot of time improving the making of that giant mobile phone.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
But what they were also doing was making the phone better, smaller, cheaper, with more features in it. So I have... littered around my spare room here, these old phones that go from car battery sized giant phones right down to the tiniest little Nokia phone, which is like a like a Mars bar that's been sliced down the middle.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
It's so thin and so small, right the way up to my nice shiny iPhone, which then got bigger again as more and more features are added in. So manufacturing is about continuous improvement, both of the product as well as making the making of the product better and better. This process of continuous improvement.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
So the story of the manufacturing of clothing is an interesting one. It's produced wonderful things, low cost clothing almost all of us can access, but it's also by making it into a disposable product, something we waste a lot of. And the whole idea of fast fashion has perhaps amplified that.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
If you want to get and to be a really good buyer of clothing, it gets quite tricky because what do we mean by good? So the huge amount of water that's required to make a single pair of jeans is just eye-watering because there's the actual production of the cotton. that needs a lot of water to make that grow because it's quite a tricky crop to grow.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
There's then all of the processing of the cotton requiring even more water. There's then the producing of the weaving and then the dyeing of the textile to make it in to give it that nice denim colour. There's then all the process of cutting and sewing to make the pair of jeans and we then put them back in to rewash them again to give them a distressed look.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
So a simple thing like a pair of jeans has an extraordinary story of energy and water consumption behind it. So you might say, well, I'll just buy better jeans. I'll only source naturally grown cotton. I'll only use, you know, the indigo dye that's been sourced from a... an appropriate source.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
But you and I, none of us, we don't really have the time to look at every single product in the store and go, can I work out whether these genes are actually the best ones for the planet? So we have to rely on other people. We have to trust our judgment. And one of the good things about...
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
The world of manufacturing at the moment is that most companies are actually really quite keen for us to know how a product has been made because they know sooner or later, if they're doing a bad thing, someone's going to find out about it. So the visibility we now have of the iPhone supply chain, of the Levi supply chain, of all of the supply chains of products is a really positive thing.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
It gives us a sense that we understand where these products have come from. Another example is electric vehicles and batteries. Just extraordinary where many of us strongly believe that electric vehicles are absolutely the way forward. Not everyone agrees. Others can see there's a long future for petrol cars and maybe even hydrogen vehicles.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
But at the moment, there's a movement that says electric vehicles are good. But if you break down the supply chain of an electric vehicle, and you go right the way back to saying not just how's the car built, how are the components made, but how are the batteries made? Where do the materials come from in that battery?
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
And it doesn't take you long to trace it all the way back to a small number of countries where they're mining things like cobalt And we don't really always know how safe, how worker-friendly those mines were. And there's some really quite bad stories about what happens in some of those very, very, very distant mines way, way down the supply chain.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
So I think this idea of trying to choose a product that is good for the planet and has been well made is very tricky.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
But now, for this generation, for us now, we have the best possible chance of understanding what's going on and shedding a bit of light onto these complex supply chains so that we can help companies, we can force companies to be better at how they manufacture things, to do it in a way that's less harmful for the planet, but also so we know we are buying a product that has been made, ideally, in the least harmful way possible.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
Mike, many thanks for that. Really appreciated it and enjoy the rest of your day.
Something You Should Know
The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made
Every single thing you can see, unless it's a plant, a rock, another person or some other animal, has been manufactured. Once you start to think about it, it's almost overwhelming. Every single thing has a manufacturing story behind it.