When Novon Lighting moved to Arndell Park in western Sydney about 18 months ago, it was a multimillion-dollar sign of confidence in Australian manufacturing, not to mention the property industry’s inclination to support local production on a big scale.
The premises are state-of-the-art, from office to factory. So too the high-end robotics that have now attracted a string of visiting executives and politicians, both from Australia and Switzerland, where the machinery originates, who want to see what a Future Made in Australia can look like on the ground.
As Anthony Galimi, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, tells The Fifth Estate on our own site visit, it’s a great time to ramp up Australian manufacturing and show we can do things “better than any country”.
With orders reaching more than 300,000 for some of the bigger clients, ambition is par for the course. The premises are large, designed for even bigger scale and in the manufacturing section, humming with the particular, non-nonsense efficiency of robots slicing steel, stacking partially finished products and applying finishes.
The company’s strategic sustainability lead, Phil Cowling, points out the environmental outcomes as he guides us through the premises.
We start in the larger than expected office area where engineers and designers are busy underway. Next stop is the generous commercial kitchen where Galimi offers barista grade coffee and proudly notes that the family tradition of treating the staff to a classic Italian lunch every Wednesday continues today, despite numbers ballooning to more than 80. Finally, we’re out the back and inside a cavernous steel structure decked with racks and a manufacturing section.
Cowling points out the new packaging system that slashes waste by using pallets instead of individually sealed products. There’s solar on the roof to produce nitrogen that’s used by the laser cutting machine to enable cleaner cutting, and he notes that water used to wash and prepare products entering the powder coating booth is itself recycled, so that no contamination leaves the site.
Carbon accounting is crucial throughout, he adds. The company strives to manufacture as much as possible on site, but still needs to import particular components from Europe, such as drivers. Cowling says.
Sheet steel is supplied by Australian BlueScope steel, with a recycled content of 28 per cent, up from 22 per cent in recent times. All waste steel is collected and recycled. “We’re working with Rebuilt (the carbon measurement tool) to explore how we can collaborate with upstream suppliers to head towards dynamic updating of LCA data.
“That’s something that won’t be captured by an EPD [environmental product declaration]”.
Getting good quality data is critical, he says, and it’s one of the reasons the company imports its lighting drivers from a European source.
“We’ve chosen to partner with an overseas company that has commitments to being net zero, complies with all the European regulations, has EPDs and has a world recognised quality standard.
“Why reinvent the wheel? It’s about partnering with good quality companies that have a chain of conduct that you can track.”
The embodied carbon footprint is also important. The company’s new linear lighting system uses extruded aluminium, with the aluminium billets smelted in New Zealand, through a hydroelectric-powered smelter that results in 65 per cent lower emissions than the global average.
But to give a hint into how complex the EPDs and carbon accounting areas are, Cowling explains that for just one lighting product, there could be “65 variations – the type of diffuser, the length, the size, the wattage, without looking at the unique ones to fit various specialised grids.
“So when you start looking at carbon accounting, it gets very complicated very, very quickly, and it also gets very expensive depending on what pathway you follow. So there are some really big challenges for Australian manufacturers in that field.”
Cowling is working with industry associations to help smooth some of the potential pathways for better solutions.
But although it’s highly complicated “down in the weeds” of materials, he’s an optimist about our prospects for climate and sustainability.
“The reason I’m an optimist is that a lot of people extrapolate trajectories (with things like AI) and imagine that the best outcome is to get better at doing things the same way.
“They don’t take into account the exponential growth in innovation, technology, materials, and the ability to come up with new ways to do things, not better ways to do the old things.”
His company is working on some “unbelievably exciting stuff” with people who are using AI – but key is that they use it as a tool.
“It’s not human innovation.” And that part is down to us.
Phil Cowling will be speaking at Circular Disruption on the kind of innovation that Novon Lighting is developing.