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Transferring Sustainable Manufacturing Knowledge to Up/Midstream Electronics Suppliers

Project description

Training for sustainable practices in Vietnam’s electronic sector

As EU environmental regulations tighten, European electronics firms are prioritising sustainability, including sourcing from developing countries. However, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face challenges due to limited access to knowledge and a lack of incentives or resources to adopt sustainable practices. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the TranSMKnow project aims to incentivise suppliers in Vietnam’s electronics sector to adopt sustainable practices through informal knowledge transfer. It will focus on a comprehensive strategy that combines ‘learning by doing’ in sustainable design and manufacturing, along with fostering mindset changes. Training will centre on typical electronics components for the EU market, enabling workers to build skills and confidence that can be applied to other similar products.

Objective

As EU environmental regulation tightens, many European electronics firms have prioritised sustainable manufacturing not just in their own products and processes, but increasingly for standard parts and components sourced from developing countries. Sourcing sustainable electronics from these nations, while hugely economically attractive, can be challenging. Small and medium-sized enterprises(SME’s) typically encounter constraints to accessing knowledge and information if they are distanced from an OEM or final manufacturer, and are unlikely to gain valuable sustainable manufacturing knowledge they can apply. In addition, many SME's producing standard electronics products, either lack incentive to move away from a ‘cost-effective products approach’, or simply do not possess the skills, resources or mindset to produce environmentally sustainable products.
TranSMKnow seeks to address this by developing and exploiting a novel ground-up approach to incentivising distant suppliers in Vietnam's growing electronics sector, to learn and adopt ‘sustainable’ practices via informal 'downstream' knowledge transfer. To achieve this, TranSMKnow develops and facilitates a holistic approach including 'learning by doing' sustainable design and manufacturing practices relating to products and/or production processes, but also building mindset change. We focus our training around a few typical electronics parts, destined for the EU, with the idea that the worker can initially build skills around these products, and then apply their new knowledge, and develop confidence to transfer this training to other products that use similar machinery and technology. This project utilises AI to chart both the supply path and the environmental 'profile' of these typical products (i.e. repeated quality, repair and recyclability issues) identified downstream, to develop a package of tailored sustainable learning processes and tools. TranSMKnow training will be validated in a few Vietnamese SME's.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-SE - HORIZON TMA MSCA Staff Exchanges

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-SE-01

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Coordinator

BRUNEL UNIVERSITY LONDON
Net EU contribution
€ 140 280,00
Address
KINGSTON LANE
UB8 3PH UXBRIDGE
United Kingdom
Region
London Outer London — West and North West Harrow and Hillingdon
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
No data

Participants (2)

Partners (1)