Your Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall: Is your Scottish salmon really made in China?
YOUR LIFE IS MANUFACTURED: HOW WE MAKE THINGS, WHY IT MATTERS AND HOW WE CAN DO IT BETTER BY TIM MINSHALL (FABER £20, 336pp)
Your Life is Manufactured is available now from the Mail Bookshop
‘Unless you are currently floating naked through space,’ Tim Minshall writes (and few of his readers will be), ‘you are right now in immediate contact with multiple manufactured products.’
The global manufacturing system produces and distributes very nearly everything we eat, wear, live in, communicate through and are entertained by.
When it is functioning properly, we take it for granted; when it ceases to work successfully, as it did in the pandemic, we are shocked and outraged. In Minshall’s words, the system is both ‘mind-bogglingly complex and worrying fragile’.
As head of the Institute for Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge, his aim in this eye-opening book is to explain how the manufacturing system works (and sometimes doesn’t) and how it can be made to work better in the future.
Examples of its complexity are easily found. Modern factories are vast. Minshall travels to China to visit the new Zeekr electric car factory. The site produces 300,000 vehicles a year. It covers eight square kilometres and he has to travel through it in a golf buggy.
Mass Production: The Zeekr electric car factory
He takes a tour of a paper-rolling mill. A paper-rolling mill, he notes, is ‘basically one huge machine wrapped in a building’. The largest is as long as six football pitches and weighs 30,000 tonnes; the fastest spits out more than two kilometres of paper, not per day nor per hour, but per minute.
Even the making of a humble product like a cherry Bakewell can be a major operation. At the Premier Foods factory, the production line turns out a quarter of a million of them each day. It’s somehow satisfying to learn that not everything there is automated. The half glacé cherry on top of each cake is placed there by hand.
The routes by which products reach us snake across the entire world. Minshall’s new bike, had, he reckoned, travelled over 20,000 kilometres before it was delivered to his front door. On it were ‘three words common to about a third of the world’s manufactured products: “Made in China”’.
An even better example of the enormous distances involved in today’s logistics is the iPhone. Components are shipped between companies all around the globe. One estimate is that your iPhone and its inner workings will have travelled at least 250,000 kilometres before it reaches you. Or, in other words, more than six times round the world.
Far from home: A wild salmon
If this seems bizarre, so too does the journey taken by some fish caught off the Scottish coast. They are despatched thousands of miles to China for processing.
They then come all the way back to the UK to be sold in your local supermarket. Thanks to low transportation costs, and other conditions, this makes economic sense but it’s difficult to see any other kind of sense in it.
Today’s manufacturing system is the product of a series of industrial revolutions.
The first of these took place in Europe, largely in Britain, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and saw the rise of the factory.
The birth of the assembly line in America heralded a second revolution. Its chief progenitor was Henry Ford who reportedly took his ideas about making cars from watching what happened to animal carcasses on a conveyor belt in an abattoir.
Father of the assembly line: David Gray and Henry Ford seated in the 1905 Ford Model N runabout
The third revolution resulted from the enormous advances in computing at the end of the twentieth century.
Minshall and others suggest that we may be in the midst of a fourth revolution as we move towards a new sustainability in manufacturing.
The present system is fragile. The pandemic revealed that but so too do less momentous events. In 2021, a cargo ship named the Ever Given somehow succeeded in wedging itself across the Suez Canal. For a week no other ships could get past it. Ten billion dollars of trade was held up on every single day.
Not only is it fragile. It is increasingly damaging to the planet. We urgently need to find ways to make it less so. Manufacturing is the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
The production of cement used in building contributes about 8 per cent of total emissions of carbon dioxide – four times that generated by aviation. Manufacturing also creates quite astonishing amounts of waste.
We cannot continue with a global food market that produces 6 billion tonnes of food a year and then wastes more than 2 billion tonnes of it which is what currently happens.
The answer, Minshall argues, is not to turn one’s back on the technological advances we have made but employ them to create what is known as a circular economy. We must reduce, reuse and recycle.
His book not only reveals the often surprising reality of today’s manufactured world but presents a hopeful account of how it can be made less damaging to the future of the planet.