CEO Monthly August 2017

CEO MONTHLY / AUGUST 2017 21 • SIPS 2016: Sustainable Industrial Processing Summit & Exhibition, held in Hainan Island, China, in November 2016: (http://www.flogen.org/ sips2016/). More than 500 abstracts from authors from 80 countries around the world, and 11 volumes of publications. Sustainability Framework Given today’s complicated and ever confusing descriptions of sustainability, we asked for Dr. Kongoli’s perspective on this issue. He agreed that there exists a confusion, and refers to his recent publication: “The criteria, the actors, the goals, have been unsystematically mixed without a clear distinction. The original definition of sustainable development has 3 intersecting criteria: environmental protection, economic development, and social development. In order to achieve sustainable development, these three criteria need to be fulfilled simultaneously. Additional inclusions of culture, politics, governance, and institutions as defining criteria is illogical. Culture is part of social development, which is already one of the criteria for sustainable development. Politics, government and institutions are actors that can achieve or undermine sustainable development with their actions, laws, regulations etc. It is extremely important to have a clear distinction between the definition of sustainable development as a set of criteria to be achieved and the actors that can either help achieve or undermine these criteria. Dr. Kongoli shows us his newly designed graphical schema of sustainability framework, which has been published previously and also reproduced above. Sustainability and Automation Given today’s somewhat negative view in society about automation as a job destroyer, we asked him about the link between automation and sustainability – both subjects that New FLOGEN Sustainability Framework are the major specialties of his company. He replies that a quick look at the history of the 20th century shows that automation has been perpetually under attack for taking away jobs from society. Despite that, automation has been developing continuously and applied in all aspects of life. Taking away jobs makes automation look like it does not fulfill the social and economic development criteria of sustainable development. However, the reality has to be looked at in the big picture and not in isolated domains. He refers us to a full analysis on the subject, which is carried out in both a recent article he published, as well as in his 2012 book “Automation”. The latter recently reached a record of 55,000 downloads. In its preface, he writes: “Automation is closely related to the modern need for sustainable development in the 21st century. One of the principles of sustainability is “Doing More with Less”, which in other words, is also one of the goals of automation. By replacing the routine part of human labor with the use of machines, automation not only increases productivity and the quality of products beyond what can be achieved by humans, but also frees space, time, and energy for humans to deal with the new, non- routine challenge of developing innovative and more advanced technologies. This magnificent cycle, in which established developments are automated and the free resources achieved by this automation are used to develop newer technologies that are subsequently automated, is one of the most successful recipes for the human race towards the goal of sustainable development.” Sustainability: Recycling or Landfilling Given the existing contradicting theories and movements that exist today on the best feasible way to treat a waste through recycling or landfilling, we asked Dr. Kongoli for his opinion. He said that it is true that some purely recycling companies have gone bankrupt because of the high cost of recycling technology used. However, recycling is always a sustainable practice if the economic criteria of sustainability is fulfilled. Landfilling is sustainable only if no feasible and competitive cost-wise technology of recycling exists. He mentioned that historically, the philosophy of any technology and industrial practice has been to produce high performance products, and landfill any related process waste. Based on this philosophy, the old Central Paradigm of Materials Science and Engineering was defined as: Processing -> Structure -> Property -> Performance Dr. Kongoli and his colleagues have proven that this is not sustainable, and they have proposed in their publications a Modified Central Paradigm of Materials Science and Achieving Sustainability through Science and Technology g