An Interview with Laura Hepburn
Laura Hepburn is a self-described career-chameleon. Having studied Futures Design at the Teesside University and then Innovation at the University of Oxford, Laura worked on feature films and TV production sets before becoming a founding director of Greenology, a UK firm that works on innovative solutions to complex plastic waste problems from tyres to wind turbine blades. Another prolific award winner, Laura was named on the Northern Power Women Future List in 2020, was named the Renewables Energy Association Young Entrepreneur this year, and also named in the Top 50 Women in Engineering Sustainability by the Women’s Engineering Society.
Ed Wilson from COP26andbeyond recently interviewed Laura about her work, the importance of sustainability and how we can encourage young people to get into engineering. Laura will be appearing as a panel speaker at our upcoming event: Engineering for the Energy Transition.
Register Here
Ed Wilson: How did you get into engineering and finding solutions to plastic waste problems?
Laura Hepburn: “I’m someone who has been very diverse in my career process and my thinking process. I did a Future Design masters about 10 years ago, and I started really looking into what was happening with our waste streams, predominately plastics, what we could be doing with them. It was really exciting in that we could apply new technology, but at the time it was very difficult to do that, so I had to carry on with my main career and produce the finances to be able to go back o it and explore it differently. So, I was working for large organisations and looking at ways that they could be more responsible, for example, working with Happy Egg and taking waste-derived fuel from chicken poo and putting it through biomass, something they had never looked at or thought about. Off the back of that, I then started to explore end-of-life tires and wind turbine blades and diverting them from landfill and incineration, and that has been our focus at Greenology over the last few years.
I don’t think you automatically have to come from an engineering background to be able to connect the dots to look at how we need to be designing for the future. Engineering isn’t just based on a man with a high vis coat on and a nice hat, its people engineering socially and sustainably, that could be in the form of how you employ people or the way you think about problems. There are lots of different aspects of engineering that I tick the box for and that gives you a bit of background.”
And you are currently the director of Greenology?
“I started Greenology once I had raised my beginning funds for R&D and went down the plastics route, so looking at the journey of plastic waste. That opened up a whole different market of commodity and showed how, if we do processes and engineering correctly, we can actually recycle the majority of plastics. There were other people doing that and I decided my time would be better spent looking at the real problems that we don’t have processes for, so that was what led me to the end-of-life tires, and then into the wind turbine blades, and looking into how to produce Hydrogen, real problems that we have in the renewables sector.”
The energy transition is going to bring new technologies in terms of how we create energy, but people need to be thinking about the full lifecycle. Can you tell us what currently happens to turbine blades and what do you plan to do with them?
“The UK as a whole is really bad at turning a blind eye to our processes sometimes, and as fantastic as wind and renewables and even solar are, we look to the future and how we can improve our technology, we don’t have an automatic way of thinking of the past and thinking about the hangovers. So, we can have this fantastic technology, but what are we doing with the problems that are already here?
The blades are currently being decommissioned and are being shipped abroad, for $30,000 apiece, to these huge landfill areas, and you can imagine that the CO2 that comes from that whole process, it’s not sustainable. Being problem solvers, we have looked at our technology and how it can be applied through Pyrolysis to create that full-circle solution, taking the blades and creating a fuel that can then be put back into the ships that would do the decommissioning So not just creating by-products such as fuel but also creating valuable by-products that we can use in, let’s say, construction.
When we talk about the energy transition it’s this fantastic thing where people say we are going to be Net-Zero by 2050, we are very passionate that we should be doing it now, not in 2030, not in 2050. There are things we can do now with just small tweaks but amazing business models, we can be teaching other people to be responsible and I think that is where our passion lies. Yes, we are great engineers in what we do but it’s our business models that can encourage larger organisations, who are probably the biggest offenders in this, to look at their own approach.”
I think there is a really interesting opportunity with that, so many engineers go into a field like renewables to be sustainable but don’t consider the end of life of things like turbine blades. The more wind turbines we put up the more we will have to decommission and we should consider that at the start of the process. By comparison, tires are an old problem, what do you work on with them?
“It’s an inherent problem, but there has to be a massive shift in what we do because its not just a problem with CO2 but it’s a problem socially. We have seen a lot of black market and dumping issues with tires, and now the doors are being closed to India and China and the exports are coming to an end, we are going to see an increase in dumping, which is only going to get worse.
So we are applying our technology full circle again, working with companies such as JCB and Pirelli and asking them “do you know the full lifecycle of your tires? Wouldn’t you like to be able to say that you contract them from beginning to end?” You can make amazing by-products from them, such as oil for generators, and we are trying to go for EN590 (an automotive diesel fuel standard) so that it can be used in JCBs. Looking at the structure of what we do, taking a waste element and creating a really valuable zero neutral product at the end, it just needs a bit of critical thinking.”
You’ve mentioned circular a couple of times, there is a phrase “the circular economy” that crops up often when we talk about sustainability, could you explain what that means to people who might not have heard of it?
“The circular economy is making sure that you consider everything as a whole. For example, with the tires, it could go through a process where it could be used as menages for horses, for example, that is half a process. But imagine if you take the tires, put them through pyrolysis to create a fuel, then taking that fuel and putting it back into the system by either creating new tires or creating the fuel that would run the tires. It would be self-sustainable all the time, and with the technologies we are bringing in now we are having to question our processes so that we are being responsible all the way through the full loop. The more education, the more conversations like this, the more we can encourage others to do the same.”
Our event and COP26andbeyond, are aimed at encouraging young people to get the tools and resources they need to influence climate action in the build-up to COP26 and beyond. How would you encourage young people to get into engineering and sustainability?
“When we talk about sustainability, I am very passionate that sustainability is not just the paper you pop into your photocopier, sustainability means jobs for life. And that means making sure that people have the right education and career advice, and that they have the tools to be part of the green recovery and the green economy. Where we are based up here in Tees Valley, although there are some fantastic things happening here with carbon capture and the wind farms, they are very future focussed, we are working very collaboratively here to make sure the next generation, who are probably more switched on than the older generation on these problems, have the access to be able to explore the green economy.
It has been predominately a steel-based industry here which has a negative effect on the climate, so there is a big challenge in being able to work together and show the younger generation that these are the jobs that will take them forward forever. In the steel industry, people have been laid off 5 to 6 times, we have really high unemployment, why are we not tackling that by looking at the skill sets? Changing the skill sets so people don’t only think they can be doctors or nurses or the usual suspects, these people can be anything and they need to be part of that revolution. We work very closely with the colleges and the universities and the schools (I think it should start early) to signpost people and give them the confidence that they can grow in those jobs and they can travel all over the world, this isn’t just a quick fix, this is for the rest of our lives.”
Do you work on getting young women into engineering?
“I am the biggest fan when it comes to equality, inclusivity and diversity, I’m very passionate. I know the barriers by being a lone funder in this sector. Unfortunately, it’s sad that we are behaving like it’s the 1970s still, and we have to shake that up. Yes, changes have been made but we do need to challenge that, and we do need to break down those barriers so we can encourage more women into the sector. Because it gives a fresh approach and a different way of doing things and innovation comes from wide minds, and that’s what we need for the future.”
Looking into the future do you think the biggest hindrances to getting to Net Zero and the Economy we will need are engineering and technical or do you think they are policy and attitude based?
“Like all things in this industry, there are so many prongs to this, whether that is financial, inclusivity, the social element but obviously technology does play a massive part. They are all intertwined. I’m glad to say I have always been a fan of collaboration, people are starting to understand that we need to work together. I would say that one of the things that will make this so much stronger is people on a local level having a choice, and having a voice in terms of what they want from this energy transition.
Policy is so tricky, decisions affecting our lives are being made at the top and maybe they don’t have their finger on the pulse so much. We need to be very careful when we are ruling out fossil fuels and talking about the transition, we can’t just rule things out, because we don’t have the infrastructure or the finance for that, we need to work together to be able to deliver it smoothly, because it’s going to have an impact on peoples lives, we need to make sure the technological innovations coming through are deliverable. For example, Hydrogen is fantastic, but have we got the infrastructure, electrification is fantastic, but have we got the infrastructure, it’s going to take time. We’ve got to be careful that the policymakers don’t knee-jerk into making it a race to net zero, yes it is a race, but don’t put a scaremongering head-on by saying “all fossil fuels out by this date”. We need to make that happen, but we need everyone working together on it, everyone being part of that policy-making decision process, it’s very important that we bring all the elements together to make that happen.”
The geographic aspect is really interesting, in an interview with one of our other panellists, Henry Preston, he was saying the old nuclear power stations are shutting down, and it’s not just a question of replacing that generating capacity but about replacing the jobs in those geographic locations. As we progress with the energy transition its important to keep the high skilled jobs in the geographies where we already have them, how do we capture the skills of people who worked in fossil fuels and redirect them?
“Absolutely, for example in Yorkshire, the heavy coal industry have had to transition, and Drax have done a good job moving to biomass and there has been a transition over time but that led to massive unemployment. We do a lot of work in the Humber making sure we future proof the skill sets of people there and encouraging them that there is a future in this transition. Where we are (Middlesbrough) there is a very heavy petrochemical industry that is dying, and instead of saying well that the end of that industry, what can we do with that industry? Can we then encourage people to do pyrolysis to create new biofuels so they are not losing those skills? Because it’s really important that those people know that it’s not the end of the line. We are going to see massive unemployment in the COVID structure we have now, unfortunately, but it’s by putting those stepping stones in place so that we can transition with the people as well as the technology.”
Thank you very much, I look forward to hearing more during our panel discussion on Thursday
“I’m really excited to be amongst absolutely amazing forward thinkers, there are some great people in there with the same passion. People are so on board with this now, and that’s what I enjoy, we are having this conversation. It’s taken us a long time, yes having COP26 here in Glasgow will make a big difference, it’s going to make people sit up, but we have got to make sure that the people that are putting those big decisions in place are not just going out to four consultants, its got to be people on the ground.”