Material efficiency: providing material services with less material production

Timothy G. Gutowski is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA. He was the Director of MIT’s Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity (1994-2004), and the Associate Department Head for Mechanical Engineering (2001-2005). From 1999 to 2001 he was the chairman of the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy panel on Environmentally Benign Manufacturing. He has over 150 technical publications, two books and seven patents and patent applications. His books are: Thermodynamics and the Destruction of Resources Cambridge University Press 2011 (with Bhavik R. Bakshi and Dusan P. Sekulic) and Advanced Composites Manufacturing, John Wiley, 1997. His research interests focus on the relationship between manufacturing and sustainability at various scales.  

Julian Allwood is Professor of Engineering and the Environment at the University of Cambridge and directs the Use Less Group. His research aims to articulate a pathway to zero emissions based on technologies that already exist at scale. From 2019–24 he is director of UK FIRES, a £5m industry and multi-university programme aiming to explore all aspects of Industrial Strategy compatible with delivering zero emissions by 2050. Julian was a Lead Author of the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with a focus on mitigating industrial emissions. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Materials, Minerals and Mining, a Fellow of the International Academy of Production Engineering and for ten years was joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Materials Processing Technology. In 2021 he was awarded the triennial JSTP International Prize for Research and Development in Precision Forging.

Mike Ashby is now Emeritus Professor in the Engineering Department at Cambridge University, having previously been a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Cambridge, and a Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art in London. He is the author of a number of books on materials. Among the more recent are “Cellular Solids” (1988, 2nd edition 1997), “Materials Selection in Mechanical Design” (4th edition 2011), “Metal Foams – a Design Guide” (2000), “Materials and Design – the Art and Science of Materials Selection in Product Design” 2nd edition (2010) and “Materials and the Environment”, 2nd edition (2012). His interests are in Design, and in the role Materials play in it. He is a founder and Director of Granta Design, Cambridge, a small company specialising in materials informatics.  

Ernst Worrell (Ph.D.) is professor ‘Energy, Resources & Technological Change’ at Utrecht University in the Copernicus Institute. He has led the industrial energy assessment work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory until 2008 and was Director Energy Use & Efficiency at the sustainable energy consulting company Ecofys between 2004 and 2010. He was a visiting scientist at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Princeton University, and visiting professor at the Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil. His research includes research and evaluation projects in industrial energy and material efficiency improvement, as well as waste management and processing. He is author of four IPCC reports. He is (co-) author of over 250 publications. He is Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling, one of the leading journals in the field of resources efficiency, associate editor of Energy, the International Journal and of Energy Efficiency, and editorial board member of Waste Management.