March 21, 2022
In this Member Spotlight, Sherry Handel, Executive Director of the Additive Manufacturer Green Trade Association (AMGTA) interviews Frank Rosengreen Lorenzen, CEO of the Danish AM Hub.
Frank Rosengreen Lorenzen is the CEO of Danish AM Hub, a philanthropical fund with a vision of creating a more sustainable production system by using additive manufacturing. For more than 15 years Frank has been working with innovation, technology, and strategy for Danish and international manufacturers at the intersection between sustainability, business, and new technology. Frank is also the Co-founder of Carbory, an organization that is deploying carbon finance in tropical forest communities to bring back and maintain rainforests.
Frank Rosengreen Lorenzen
The Danish AM Hub made an early-on commitment to join the AMGTA as a Participating Member in September of 2020 to support the advancement of sustainability in the AM industry. How has your involvement as an AMGTA member benefited Danish AM Hub?
Frank: Joining the AMGTA has helped us to enlarge our international network and to identify the leading organizations within the additive manufacturing industry globally that are driving the sustainability agenda forward. The vision shared with AMGTA on environmental sustainability is key to pushing additive manufacturing technology into a more sustainable direction.
In your role as CEO of the Danish AM Hub, what has been your biggest environmental sustainability challenge and how are you addressing it?
Frank: A lot of our work is about creating awareness of our message and drawing focus to the potential within additive manufacturing technology. We need to get the message across to companies, politicians, and other stakeholders. Our dedicated team is working hard to communicate that AM has clear sustainability benefits and can help lift our manufacturing industry to a level where AM is used as an enabler for more sustainable production.
Luckily, in these times of crisis – with both a global pandemic and a supply chain crisis – my biggest challenge is also our greatest opportunity. The current challenges in our production system can and must not be ignored or downsized anymore. We need to use this momentum to change the way we design, develop, and produce. We need best practice cases that can stimulate the change toward using AM to create more sustainable production—best practice cases that concretely measure how much CO2 equivalents we can reduce in the manufacturing industry by applying AM technologies.
In 2021, the Danish AM Hub received €5.4 million in funding from the Danish Industry Foundation to accelerate the adoption of AM in the Danish manufacturing sector. How are you deploying this funding? What do you expect to achieve with this investment? Is any of this funding specifically allocated to environmental sustainability projects or research?
Frank: We are strategically focusing the next four years on bringing AM and sustainability to the top of our manufacturing industry’s mind. We need to address the potential of AM in a sustainability context focusing on the concrete and measurable changes that should happen on the manufacturing floor.
Danish AM Hub wants to be the worlds’ first membership organization that will measure CO2 reduction via AM across members’ activities in our projects. Right now, we are setting up a group of AM developers, researchers, and large manufacturers that will help us focus and shape that engagement. We would welcome the AMGTA’s involvement in this effort. At the end of 2022 we will have around 25 cases where Danish producers have removed CO2 with AM – it will be documented and shared via open-source software with the rest of the AM community. This transparency will hopefully inspire the manufacturing industry as a whole to create more tailor-made, repairable and improvable parts and products with minimum waste and transportation, as well as material and CO2 and that can be circulated back into manufacturing at the end of its useful life.
We will continue to spread positive messages on the opportunities that lie within AM to the Danish manufacturing industry through our wide range of activities e.g., our annual conference AM Summit, the AM Reports, Innovations programs, and the larger groundbreaking innovations visionary project where we will challenge the existing potential of AM.
We will continue to grow our member base both nationally and internationally and continuously look for new international partners to engage in philanthropic activities where so we can push the limits of AM technology even further.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the third annual AM Summit hosted by Danish AM Hub that was held in August 2021 was record-setting in the number of participants and companies presenting and showing. What do you attribute this growth to? What are your expectations for the 2022 AM Summit and when will it be held?
Frank: The Danish AM Hub is the focal point for AM in Denmark with a core role in communicating about AM within Denmark and internationally. The AM Summit has helped us to do so and has received wide recognition with a record both in participants joining us from around the world, in exhibitors showcasing how to use AM, and with interesting speakers. We believe this is partly due to the fact that our members and other key stakeholders are eager to share their visions and thoughts on AM. We had a very strong lineup in 2021 which was both due to us being more established in the Danish AM community and to the sustainability agenda being prioritized within our Danish production companies.
In 2021 and at our next AM Summit to be held September 7, 2022 in Copenhagen, we will again focus on AM as a driver for sustainable manufacturing – and with the great support from last year’s AM Summit, we expect to once again be inspired by examples from the speakers and exhibitors, and we are especially enthusiastic to see how they have continued developing sustainable production.
For more insights from Frank Rosengreen Lorenzen, listen to his interesting interview on the 3D Podcast.