 I'm the associate provost and director of the Galasano Institute for Sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology and I'm also the CEO of a national institute called the Remade Institute which is established by the government to support development in the circular economy in sustainability area, sustainable manufacturing area specifically and it is a large consortium consists of 148 entities from industry to academia, national labs, trade associations and this is the again this is part of my responsibility. Sure, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us today. You know a lot of people think they know what sustainable manufacturing is. Are most of us right or what do we not understand or know about sustainable manufacturing? So sustainability is about the balance in the system supply and demand ensuring that that we are basically taking into account in our industrial system the impact of what we do and also make sure we understand the supply side of this raw material that we use and also understand the environmental impact and make sure that we have we balance this picture to make sure that we're not causing a lot of harm on the environments unnecessarily and also making sure that we we actually watching our consumption of materials and raw material to ensure that we were able to satisfy our demands in the future without really having any big big challenges. I think when you talk about sustainable manufacturing there is a you know there typically there are a lot of information that is only addressing one piece of the puzzle and very seldom we see something that describes the whole picture so you know in reality since the beginning of the industrial revolution we had abundance of resources we had abundance of materials. Right so it sounds like what you're seeing is that today's developed countries pick up a lot of ad habits in developing the economies that we have today and we don't want today's developing countries to continue those bad habits but we want them to increase their standard of living without the same impacts on the economy. It was an article a long time ago I think I can't remember if it was business week or something like that that said China or and India either they will destroy the world or they will save the world and I think the rationale that in this article was that if they copy with their population level and everything else they copy the model that we used in in the West in building our industrial system with all of its the consequences with that and they they do that at a much higher scale now because of their population and size they will destroy the world that was the more of the article you know talking about and however if they are much more innovative and come up with much more efficient methods they would save the world because that because again the scale of what they do is significance and you know I was in a lot of my lecture I show pictures from a hotel room where I was in China in Shanghai and I basically I was there for two weeks so I just in a Friday in my hotel window I took picture and you can see you can't even see the building across the street the day after I mean Saturday I took the same picture and all of a sudden there are building across the street the haze and the pollution just significant from the industrial development there and again they are using they are copying things that we've done in the West but they are what we did in the West was not at the same scale so what happened is that they just at the scale they developed their system and copying a lot of those methods result in significant impact that that that we was not predicted and and I think you know again the scale is really a major factor in a lot of challenges that we see in this area. Do you remain an optimist in your endeavor you talk about how these two countries could either rule or save the world are you still an optimist? Absolutely I think there you know the key here is that there are limits if you know my panel was the United Nation Environment Program actually we do reports we call it the global resources outlook and I think the last report was in 2018 I'm working with a team now and developing the next one is going to be 2023 and and and we're saying that basically in greenhouse gas emission if business as usual continues we're probably going to increase greenhouse gas emission by 2050 by you know 47 percent. However we're showing that with sustainability and with if we are to employ a lot of the sustainability some bill measures across the globe we can reduce greenhouse gas emission by significant percentage we're talking about like 90 percent so there so there is a there's optimism if we are to employ many of those measures however I've been around for many years and you know it's always disappointing to see that the indicators are there the approaches to address some of those issues are identified but the will to actually employ it isn't there so yeah I mean we haven't lost it yet haven't lost this battle yet but but there is definitely urgency in moving fast otherwise you know some of those you know some of those factors that we're looking at today are irreversible you know from biodiversity to greenhouse gas emissions to rise in temperatures and all and all of those factors I think once you reach that point you know a turning point it's hard to reverse some of those measures sure sure were there any challenge were there any lessons we learned during COVID that can be applied to today's challenges going forward I think you know unfortunately people forget very quickly you know we I think we we learned during COVID for example there were a like a lot of work going on including was my organization we had our healthcare system in New York state we had this alarms about ventilators and all of this stuff and we had a lot of organization including mine worked on developing emergency ventilators a fast way to to provide substitute materials that use for healthcare system and what we learned is that a lot of this stuff happened very quickly and we created a lot of stuff that were very valuable and useful so when we put our head into something and when we have a crisis we this crisis got us to work together and having a solid goal to go after and we were able to meet to meet that goal in the environmental area I think and in sustainability area we do have a crisis it just not been treated as such and you know you see the inner inner governmental panel on climate change talking about co-dread and and raising that alarm but a lot of a lot of the you know governmental organization I mean we we turned a lot of a lot of the issues a lot of the debate over climate change and many of these issues into a political issue where it should have been left to the scientists I mean there the politicians are divided over climate change and its impact the scientists aren't and and I think this issue should have really been left to the professionals to address to to to guide and inform policy however the issue has really got lost in in a lot of the political debates but we do have a crisis like covid and and the implication are severe and and it's that the issues are not treated treated us and final question give me the aleater pitch on re-manufacturing yeah so so one of the the the the most effective and and and and amazing technology that was developed in the u.s. here many many years ago Henry Ford was actually one of the industrialists actually that started the organized facility for this is re-manufacturing so re-manufacturing simply is an industrial process that take product that are coming back from from the use phase and and through a very rigorous industrial process we disassemble the product to the component level we clean inspect restore and and and deal with a lot of parts and sometimes if parts are are basically worn we replace them and then you go through an assembly process of a product similar to what we do is a brand new product the difference here is that many of like large durable parts of the of product like engine or jet engine or something like that they have multiple life cycles and once you qualify that they are absolutely meaning the specification is new ones then they go into making of a new product or a new re-manufacturing product so re-manufacturing is basically a process by which will bring a product that's coming back from the use phase and bring it back to like new condition and the reality is that by doing so you're using anywhere from 70 to 90 percent of materials coming back from the use phase you don't mind for version material for that you're saving the energy that made those parts you're saving the capital equipment that made those parts you're saving the labor cost so the the savings are significant the saving is it's about 50 percent for example so you you're providing the consumer with a very um high quality product similar to brand new products you know companies like Xerox Caterpillar GE was medical equipment uh aircraft parts and stuff like that