SHAPE builds sustainable practices and innovations for the emerging remanufacturing industry
Charlotta Risku is General Manager of Innovation and Sustainability at Mirka and heads the SHAPE ecosystem.
The newly launched five-year SHAPE Ecosystem by Mirka Oy intends to reshape the manufacturing industry. We spoke with Charlotta Risku, Manager of the SHAPE programme at Mirka, about her passion for the environment and how the emerging remanufacturing industry can provide solutions to complex challenges.
Charlotta Risku wants to make an impact through her work. She is the General Manager of Innovation and Sustainability at Mirka and heads the SHAPE ecosystem, launched in June 2023. Her ambition of making an impact stems from a deeply rooted love for the environment and a fascination for the complexity of sustainability.
Outside of work, Charlotta finds great delight in sailing with her family and she has a passion for old buildings that have endured the test of time. Her personal interests reflect her love for the environment, recycling and extending the life of products through surface finishing.
Mirka’s success and the success of SHAPE are intertwined. The Business Finland funded programme enables Mirka to build more sustainable business practices, discover future-proof innovations for the green transition and help customers to effectively navigate the complexities of sustainability.
Remanufacturing, according to Risku, can replace traditional manufacturing on a large scale by extending the life cycle of durable goods. As an example, Charlotta mentions how surface finishing extended the life span of the Baltic Yachts’ Queen Anne, a 50-year-old sailing boat. Surface finishing is Mirka’s key business and crucial for managing and extending the product life cycle, which is essential for the green transition of the manufacturing industry.
Mirka aims to reshape the life cycle of materials through remanufacturing and collaboration with industry actors through the SHAPE ecosystem. Partnerships are sought for material processing challenges, particularly at the end of the life cycle. The SHAPE Ecosystem focuses on finding solutions in production and materials, exploring recycled and biobased materials. Collaboration is crucial for volume and industrial-scale processing.
The Research and Development themes of SHAPE are as follows:
1. Boosting Circularity: Focuses on circularity, value chains, and waste logic. Solving both local and global recycling challenges for abrasives and collecting waste generated in surface finishing processes are priorities.
2. Sustainable Materials: Emphasizes recycled and recyclable materials, with interest in EU regulations and developing recyclable resins.
3. Repair, Reuse, and Remanufacturing: Explores surfaces and functional surfaces to enhance sustainability, aiming for reusability and durability. The Dust to Value project explores reusing wood dust in new products.
4. Intelligence through Value Chains: What can’t be measured, can’t be changed. This theme aims to measure and explore the impact of manufacturing industry value chains in its entirety and the current level of sustainable practises. Partnerships are sought for creating a value chain model.
In order to successfully adapt to the sustainable shift within the industry, both locally and globally, the SHAPE ecosystem needs all kinds of expertise. Risku looks forward to collaborating with other actors in the manufacturing industry, emphasizing the need for expertise not only in surface finishing, but also in traceability, data management, and processes as well.