2.0 Future Factories

The use of 3D printing to repatriate industry and drive re-use

Britain started outsourcing production to China in the 1950s. Cheap labour, lax labour laws, and the UK’s position in Hong Kong all enabled UK-based companies to move production to China with relative ease. Over the next 50 years, this process quickened and deepened. The degree of which means that many products made famous by their UK ancestry are now made in China.

However, a mix of issues has forced companies to revisit their supply lines. This started long before Covid, as labour costs increased and quality, always an issue, didn’t improve, and the cost of shipping and doing business started to bite. We can argue all day about how China stole IP, uses state funding to drive competitors out of business before putting up prices, or uses market dominance in key sectors as a means of strategic coercion. Still, if we are honest, this is probably what we would do if we got the chance, and it is historically what we did do. It’s not personal, it’s just good business!

However in the constant game of moving markets, one action creates a reaction, and the response to China’s economic policies is for companies to look at alternative supply lines. Repatriating work, or moving it elsewhere are the most commonly listed ideas. China has made it more difficult to get into countries that might be on that list, such as Africa and SE Asia. They have covered most of their bases and outmaneuvered the Western world. They own the raw material, the manufacturers, and the middleman. Often they own or have large stakes in everything up to (and sometimes including) the consumer. It is pure genius.

But as this plan becomes ever more obvious and every time it becomes a little bit harder to do business, necessity once again becomes the mother of invention. This is no different from OPEC controlling oil output to increase prices, for America’s frackers to step in and totally change the game. Now, OPEC has more or less thrown in the towel, and it only took 10 years.

Companies could bring work back to the UK, we have the bodies, we have the space, we have the expertise, the R&D potential, the supply hubs, etc, but costs are higher. The government makes doing business as difficult as possible and in some cases demonises wealth creators, not always incorrectly, but there is a sense that sometimes wealth creation is dirty, everybody wants it, and governments need it, but they don’t want to be seen to support it… too much. This is just ill-thought-out dogma; Governments need to let businesses loose but legislate against bad behavior.

But let’s get back to the point, if you wanted to bring back manufacturing to the UK, you couldn’t do what the Chinese do, the cost base is way too high; Unions make it almost impossible to flex a company’s most important and expensive asset (staff) and big business misbehave so often there is no way of setting up without Unionisation. Inevitably future factories will design out what used to be its biggest resource (staff again), in which case we need to start from scratch and come up with a whole new way of manufacturing goods.

Future Factories

With the advent of machine learning, 3D printers, and easily accessible design software, designers can now produce a beta testing product in a matter of hours, from CAD design to a completed usable product.

So if you can do one, why not 100’s or 1000’s.

If you had a mass of 3D printers/CNC platforms, laser cutters, etc, capable of manipulating plastic, metal, wood, cloth… connected, with fully automated assembly sections, and interconnected building methods you could probably produce 90% of all the non-food ‘stuff’ we buy.

To make it work you would need to use a commonality structure. So products that use the same template, e.g. electrical products that use the same components and skeleton. Similar methods of fixing products together, so that the same machines can be used to build the item, but in essence, all plastic toys for instance can be 3D printed, clicked together, packaged, boxed, and shipped without being touched by human hands. Electronics are the same, furniture, clothes….. more or less anything, if it was designed to be that way.

And products could be built on demand, in singlicate. Bespoke, personalised… whatever. Take for example Lego, firstly, yes you could 3D print each Lego block on demand, you could do it in whatever colour was requested and, yes, you could design your own product and have software break it down into the Lego components you need and make/pack those just for you. But that’s not what I mean.

No, I mean, think of the idea behind the Lego products, the same components, and bricks that can be made into a huge array of different things. Theoretically, you could build anything in the same way, you just need to have the right material, a way of cutting, printing, or weaving that material, a common way of connecting each part, and a common building platform. All cars and vans are the same except for the bits you see. All furniture uses the same theme that has been about for 1000’s of yrs, clothes are all the same, and virtually everything we have is just a form of plastic, metal, wood, or cloth. The difficult bit is making it simple enough to use one or more of these materials to build a lot of different items in a way that can be easily controlled and made by the same machines.

Now imagine you want to buy a pair of jeans, you could just log onto a website, put in your measurements, select the type of material, colour, wash, stitch, pocket lining, hem finish, number of belt loops, etc; and then a machine cuts, sows, packs, and ships. If you can do this, you can do the same thing for a chair, a shelf, a table, a plant pot, a bath, a kitchen, a car, a pair of socks… you get the picture.

The factory would work 24/7, with the only people required on-site likely to be engineers. Highly paid technical jobs. Remember no British jobs would be lost, as these went in the 70s and 80s, so it’s all upside. The new suppliers would be the ones making the raw materials and the machines. Much of the raw materials could come from recycling, e.g. plastics, cloth, and metal, and if we could design in recycling at the outset, then an old plastic toy could become part of a bath, a toilet seat, a t-shirt, or the fixings on a shelf. Then eventually the old toy that became a toilet seat, could be remade into a new toy… or another toilet seat!

Factories could be placed in key parts of the country, keeping delivery times down and maintaining continuity and uptime. Factories acting as both producers of products but also recycling centers. Now for the final piece of the puzzle.

Recycling is a pain, especially for complex products, but if this is already done, then it’s easy. So products should be designed with the concept of being recycled and recycling centers should pay for pre-prepared materials, clothes that have all their buttons, zips, etc removed, wood that has been de-nailed, and separated into species, complex products that have been separated into metal type, plastic etc. Let the marketplace drive re-use by creating an economy. Then recycling would become part of everyone’s day, if you couldn't resell something, then prepare it for recycling, take it to a center and get paid for it that way. Making things easier to breakdown, and making different components easily recognizable for separation, means that just like you can get money for old lead and copper piping at the scrap metal yard, you would do the same for plastic, etc. And centers should be in easily accessible places like supermarkets.

Factories like these could mean that products would be available in moments, you could bespoke your own, and changes could be made on the fly. Materials could be re-used over and over again, and waste from each product would get smaller and smaller.