Andy Gomarsall MBE is one of only 30 Englishmen to know what it takes to win the Rugby World Cup; the pinnacle of his chosen profession. But having climbed that mountain, his focus now is on a different, but vitally important path as chairman of Technology Lifecycle company N2S. Gomarsall spoke to Sustainable Future News about his transition into the sustainability sector.
Andy Gomarsall is best known for his glittering rugby career that saw him play for some of the UK’s best-known clubs including Wasps, Gloucester and Harlequins and unforgettably forming part of England’s famous squad that went on to win the sport’s biggest prize at the 2003 World Cup. But after working with his dad as a 17-year-old his interest in his father’s recycling business was sparked.
“I’m really lucky to have a great mentor as a father, & he was a huge influence on me for the career that I chose, & was lucky enough to go on into, but I think one thing that motivated me was at 17 years old, doing some school holiday work and it was decommissioning telephone exchanges, which was extracting Telephony cards & pulling cables from under the floor & recovering a lot of redundant equipment out of a building in London,” says Gomarsall.
“So I knew what the business did and what it was. He gave me some work in the school holidays and made me realise what hard work it is. This motivated me to do well at my rugby and we’ll see where the company goes in the future. I didn’t actually realise we’d still be here today, replicating the same service across all technology domains. The smell of that telephone exchange I still remember at 17 years old and going back into the sites gives me great memories of that journey ultimately.”
Who are N2S?
N2S was founded 20 years ago under the leadership of Jack Gomarsall. Since then, the company has seen year-on-year growth in the ever-expanding green technology & sustainability sector.
The company is a technology lifecycle management (TLM) solutions provider. The goal is to maximise the material recovery and residual value from IT equipment at every stage of its lifecycle.
“We have grown pretty much most years as a team organically and in a modest fashion,” says Gomarsall. “We’re very grateful to our customers that we’re still here and breathing. We started as one small warehouse when I joined, then it was three small warehouses, then in 2011 it became a bigger warehouse with huge offices & today at a significant scale with considerable investment in the business.”
N2S now has four sites in the UK, one of which is in Cambridge, which involves market-leading refining bioleaching plants. “We are really proud of this because it will be the first plant permitted by the Environment Agency in the UK, so we’re flying the flag for Britain,” says Gomarsall.
Gomarsall explained how this solution will benefit companies looking to optimise their supply chains, but noted a challenge: not many companies have really looked at what happens in these processes.
According to research, the UK is on course to become the largest contributor of e-waste in Europe, overtaking Norway, the current leading producer globally. The UK is also one of the largest e-waste exporters, sending much of it abroad for others to buy and deal with. It is these businesses, Gomarsall notes, that N2S is looking to work with. For companies that are “heavily ESG focused”, N2S can help them work through their environmental challenges, which can “equate to sometimes 80% of the opportunity”.
“We’re very focused on those businesses that want to be greener and want to understand their supply chains,” says Gomarsall. “What bioleaching effectively does is break down critical materials from IT equipment and in particular the PCB’s. This is an important innovation in the developing circular economy age which will benefit our climate efforts..”
Only recently The European Council gave the green light to the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) which will require more companies to publish detailed information about their impact on the environment.
This highlighted how corporate business reputation is more important than ever and companies such as N2S can help with that as Gomarsall explained. “We are here to protect our customers’ reputation, to make sure they’re doing the right things. We’re protecting their data. There are instances of big companies that haven’t chosen the right supply chain to help them on that sustainability journey.
“Some companies may have been fined very heavily in the millions of pounds for not performing this service well enough and then when there was a breach and that might be an environmental breach, or it might be a data breach they just bury their heads in the sand. That’s why the fines have been increasing,” he continues.
Solving the e-waste problem
Electronic waste (e-waste) is one of the fastest-growing environmental issues facing the globe today. The UN estimates that over 57 million tonnes of e-waste are generated globally every year. If nothing is done, this will more than double by 2050, to 120 million tonnes, according to a World Economic Forum report from 2019.
In the UK alone, 1.5 million tonnes of e-waste is generated annually. A recent report by Material Focus stated that over 200,000 tonnes of UK business electricals are improperly disposed of each year, including by fly-tipping and landfill.
Manufacturing, purchasing, moving and disposing of IT all have an environmental cost, and if not done properly, can have a huge impact on your business’s carbon footprint. N2S’s TLM services can help businesses and the public sector to measure and reduce the environmental impact of their technology.
N2S’s mission statement is to create an infinite economy for the tech industry through collaboration and partnerships, challenging both the company and those they work with to ‘be infinitely better’.
Looking ahead to 2023
A vital event for business regulation was COP27 held in Sharm El-Sheik. Having been part of last year’s conference in Glasgow the N2S chairman was less impressed with the progress made at this year’s event, especially to improve circular economies in certain sectors.
The circular economy is a model of production and consumption focused on reducing waste and pollution by introducing reusability into the core of a product’s lifecycle.
For the most part, society follows a linear economy (also known as a ‘take → make → waste’ economy). Participants create products with raw materials, use them, and then dispose of them prematurely, losing access to the raw materials used to initially create them.
“I think people have come away from COP27 slightly disillusioned & flat and that’s a great shame,” says Gomarsall. “I think the general consensus on COP is that it feels very disappointing that greater statements and greater commitments haven’t been accelerated.
“Time is of the essence and that’s the challenge,” he adds. “What I want to see is a lot more responsibility being taken by businesses, and if governments are too slow, then businesses really have to push forward and speed that process up.
“The 2023 edition of think-tank Circle Economy’s circularity gap report has been published (16 January) and we have gone backwards, becoming less circular, posing major risks to climate efforts. Only 7.2% of the 100 billion tonnes of virgin natural materials used each year make it back into the economy after their first use, down from 9%! Our opportunity has become greater therefore. The need to get our message to the market has become critical, but we need urgent collaboration.”
Looking ahead, Gomarsall was “hopeful for COP28 in the UAE”, specifically that there’ll ‘be a lot more meat on the bones, on the progress that has been made in this coming year.’ “I think this year has been really, really difficult for a number of reasons, so I’m hoping that they seize this moment,” he adds. “It’s time for action and execution in our space.”
“There’s a lot of great people that are trying their hearts out. Hopefully, we will see that at COP28. There is a long way to go and as I know, in sport, you can only control the controllables. If we can get closer to creating an infinite lifecycle of technology, by reintroducing those critical raw materials, then we’re going to go some way to solving the challenges around how we manufacture.
“That’s exciting for us really and we’ve got a great opportunity – we can only focus on that and that’s what we’re going to do.”
