Trane Technologies vice president of sustainability Scott Tew talks with Green Builder Media about how circular products and smarter material sourcing are reshaping manufacturing, and how digital diagnostics are moving buildings from smart to self-healing.
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Sara Gutterman: I am Sarah Gutman, CEO of Green Builder Media, and I am here today with one of my very favorite people in the industry, got to the VP of sustainability for Train Technologies. We are so excited for your upcoming session at the Sustainability Symposium 2025. We're going to cover a lot of very relevant topics in that session, but I want to just ask you a few questions today as a precursor to that session, so that we can let people know what you're going to be talking about there.
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Sara Gutterman: Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Super. So first let's talk about circular products. You know, fully circular products sound incredible. But you know how do we really get there.
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Scott Tew: So circular products. I mean you know this whole concept I think was pie in the sky for a long time. We all talked about it, but no one was really doing it. But things have changed so much. We've now many of us are finding some incredible opportunities around circular products. And when I say circular products, I'm thinking the broadest term of all around circular products.
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Scott Tew: And that would be the materials that we that we're using an alternative to those materials. Think, as you know, we can think about closed loop recycling for the metals that go into products like a train technologies produces. Those things were so difficult to make happen in the past that required special contracts, special suppliers, special management teams. But, you know, I think we're at a different place now.
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Scott Tew: Those things are very possible now. But then if you think about things like, should we be taking our products back? And if so, what happens to those products? I mean, we have found ways to take products back now and to refurbish them. We turn them into rentals and we can we can then use them for buildings that are being reconstructed or deconstructed.
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Scott Tew: And we didn't even think that way.
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Scott Tew: A decade ago.
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Scott Tew: And so not only our circular circularity is it has it come into its own space now for companies that manufacture what we do, but it also is becoming new business opportunities as well. So, you know, the best world sustainability that comes up its own profit center. It becomes its own way of increasing revenue and new value enhancement. I mean, this is this is where circularity is today.
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Scott Tew: I think for companies who manufacture things, their opportunities are there. Great. And we continue to uncover them all the time. And I know that many of the others that will be participating in the symposium, probably in the same place.
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Sara Gutterman: I want to shift gears and talk about reinvent, reinventing resource management and waste management. So what does that actually look like in practice?
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Scott Tew: We are now more than ever before questioning how we resource the things that we resource. And I don't mean questioning our suppliers. We're questioning the materials that we are sourcing. We're questioning the materials that we specify for our products. I remember, and for many of your home builder visitors who will be part of the symposium, I remember when one of the items that we could not recycle it all in, in the homes air conditioning system was the actual pad that we set our units on outside of people's homes in their backyards.
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Scott Tew: Because the pad we were using a pad that had integrated glass into some recycled material. But overall, that pad could never be recycled because you can't even to. Today, you can't recycle materials that have been blended with metals and glass. So we hit a rethink about that. But that was that's just one example. Where were we thinking all the materials now?
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Scott Tew: For instance, why do we keep specifying so much virgin copper from materials sort of the inside of our material? Why aren't we specifying more virgin? I mean, recycled copper, that would actually do us several things. If we could do that, it may change the relationship with a supplier. It may enhance it in a different way, at least to some innovations and material innovations.
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Scott Tew: And the bigger issue is that we wouldn't have to be mining copper from the earth anymore. We could do less of that impact. On the flip side of that, we have to have resources in place to do the testing. We don't want to compromise quality, reliability, efficiency and other things that are important to the system. So we've got to be able to do that work.
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Scott Tew: But what we're finding is oftentimes there are other tangible benefits to changing out resources and materials that we didn't realize before we started this work. So now we have built all of these questions and tools into our product development process to sort of force ourselves to ask the right questions so that we actually go out and look for alternatives.
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Scott Tew: We do the work required to answer the questions. And what we're finding is our systems. Not only are there negative trade offs, but these new iterations of these systems and they bring they bring some new value to customers and homeowners, building owners that we weren't even offering you in five years ago.
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Sara Gutterman: That is fascinating. What do you think is the top climate innovation that will define the next 5 to 10 years?
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Scott Tew: It'll be digital enhancements. I'm not going to say the acronym AI, but I just said it. Digital enhancements though, we're really excited about the possibilities here and we're seeing lots of possibilities. It is an enhancement though. It's not like these digital enhancements fundamentally change how we deliver comfort to buildings. It doesn't do that. But what it does do is that making we can in the past, we use terms like smart buildings.
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Scott Tew: I think we use it too early because I think where digital enhancements are taking us, maybe truly what smart buildings, the vision of smart buildings that we had even a decade ago. Because in the future we're going to have buildings and systems like the ones that train technologies produces that can almost heal themselves. They certainly can diagnose what needs healing.
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Scott Tew: That's absolutely a possibility today, and they're doing it. We have systems in place right now with customers and building owners and homeowners, and the systems can diagnose what needs healing. They can diagnose what's sick about the system, what needs attention. They can actually speak to other systems, including our own, to say this system needs this particular part replaced.
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Scott Tew: It needs to be replaced today, our next month because it's it's at it end of its useful life. And what's this doing is number one is increasing the productivity of how we service systems. And by the way, better servicing a system like your car, your automobile or your home. You increase the life of that system. It runs as designed.
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Scott Tew: It's more efficient often. And so we actually have the technologies in place now, these digital technologies that are doing these things for us that in the past were just concepts that we didn't know where possible. We were hopeful, but not only are they possible, we're doing it today.
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Sara Gutterman: I love the way that you are articulating this digital enhancement, and we don't shy away from using the term AI, and we have a whole session on it. Oh good. The sustainability symposium. And we're really going to look at how AI actually can enhance the performance, the efficiency, the proactive diagnostics and maintenance for the built environment. Because you're right, it takes human and system error out of the equation and optimizes that performance.
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Sara Gutterman: So we're here to talk more about that and here to hear your thoughts on what to write. So final question is and I'm going to switch gears a little bit. You have been trained technologies and you personally have been one of our closest friends and allies and colleagues for a long time now, nearly two decades. And and train has been a perennial partner and sponsor of the sustainability symposium since our inception.
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Sara Gutterman: So we our ninth annual sustainability symposium. So why do you like this event? What are you excited about with respect to this year's event? And just tell us about why why this is special to you.
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Scott Tew: Personally and professionally. I truly believe that we've got to we've got to spend time with people that I think are leading the way. How else are we supposed to know if there's an alternative way, if we don't surround ourselves with people that may have a better idea or a better way of accomplishing something. And I think that the sustainability symposium that you put on is absolutely one of those moments where you can spend a few hours learning either a different and better way of approaching a solution, or it's just learning from those who are doing it differently, and maybe even better.
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Scott Tew: These are this is not time wasted. This is how I think great companies and great leaders in their time, which is figuring out what about your process, should your question and what can you learn from somebody else doing it differently? And this is the perfect moment. And this is why we've been a we've been glad to sponsor the symposium because we truly believe as a company, I believe personally, that this is time well spent.