TranSMKnow · Transferring Sustainable Manufacturing Knowledge to Up/Midstream Electronics Suppliers

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.