For 70% of the world’s population, doing the laundry means hours of difficult manual washing. It was this fact that led Nav Sawhney to leave his job as a design engineer at Dyson and try to come up with a way to fix this problem. After six different design iterations, Nav and his team at...

How should local and regional leaders encourage investment in their communities? Around the world, cities struggle with a legacy of industrial decline. In England, devolution of planning policy to mayoral combined authorities has allowed for regions like Greater Manchester to outpace national growth. But within regions, local areas can themselves fall behind, and require a...

Project managers have traditionally measured the viability of a project design or materials choice as a triangle, balancing cost, scope and performance. With the addition of carbon, this triangle becomes a three-sided pyramid, with four considerations each interacting with the others.  Materials suppliers and project designers now have a wealth of carbon cutting innovations available...

Formula Student is Europe’s top educational motorsport competition, with students and teams from all over the world coming to compete. The competition is integrated into engineering degree courses, allowing students to take what they are learning in the classroom and lab, into the real world. It tests both engineering skills, and the project management that...

Lean production techniques have become common across heavy industry. They cut resource use, and promote quality assurance. They were inspired by shelf stocking techniques used in US grocery stores. But can they now be turned to the start of the grocery supply chain, farming itself? That is the goal of Engineering Matters Awards Sustainability Gold...

We can only efficiently reduce those things that we can measure. The Whole Life Carbon Assessment standard, produced by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), established a method for assessing the carbon impact of buildings. Its updated version, which came into effect in July, expanded its scope to include infrastructure, and was designed to...

The Engineers Without Borders UK People Design Challenge is a year long challenge that is part of many UK engineering students’ degrees. For this episode we went to Stoller Hall in Manchester to cover the Design Challenge final. The design challenge each year focuses on a new community, and puts them at the centre of...

With the launch of robot taxis, we are already seeing autonomously controlled devices operating alongside humans in the public realm. As AI improves it will become embedded in our physical environment, in factories and construction sites, and in our streets and homes. In episode 267, we talked to Darren Martin about the importance of considering...

What does it take to win at the Olympics? For Pierre Engel, chief engineer at ArcelorMittal, victory took years of experience, precision, and collaboration. He was aided by kit made entirely of a novel material—low carbon recycled steel. Pierre’s challenge shared much with those faced by Olympians. But he wasn’t skipping rope to keep himself...

The UK is a global leader when it comes to the development of offshore wind energy. Despite past government bans on onshore wind development, the UK was able to continue developing its wind energy portfolio by going out to sea. The UK now generates over a quarter of its electricity from wind, with a significant...