🏎 Formula One’s Race Towards Sustainability

Jamie’s career took a defining turn when he joined Honda Racing F1, a sport driven by milliseconds and cutting-edge innovation. While many industries hesitate to embrace sustainability due to concerns over cost and complexity, F1’s relentless pursuit of efficiency provided a unique testing ground.

🚀 Key Sustainability Challenges in F1:

• Carbon Fibre Waste: Unlike metals, carbon fibre is notoriously difficult to recycle, leading to excessive waste.
• Energy-Intensive Logistics: The sport’s global calendar requires frequent international transport, increasing emissions.
• High-speed R&D vs. Sustainability Priorities: Development cycles in F1 are lightning-fast, often leaving little room for long-term environmental considerations.

Rather than seeing these as roadblocks, Jamie recognised that the culture of optimisation in F1 could be leveraged to embed sustainability.

“In Formula One, innovation is non-negotiable. If you apply that same mindset to sustainability, you stop seeing it as a limitation and start seeing it as a way to push performance forward.”

Some of the key innovations he helped implement included:

✅ Carbon Fibre Recycling Trials – exploring methods to repurpose discarded materials.
✅ Waterless Vehicle Cleaning – reducing water use across logistics operations.
✅ Sustainable Branding – shifting team sponsorships towards companies with strong environmental credentials.

🔄 Bringing Circularity to Automotive Manufacturing

After F1, Jamie transitioned to Jaguar Land Rover, where the challenge was not speed, but scale. Unlike the bespoke world of motorsport, automotive production is about mass efficiency—meaning sustainability solutions need to work across millions of vehicles.

🌿 Key Circular Economy Strategies at JLR:

• Closed-loop aluminium recycling – melting down old vehicles to create new ones, reducing raw material demand.
• Lightweighting initiatives – using composite materials to lower vehicle weight and improve fuel efficiency.
• Reducing embodied carbon in interiors – incorporating sustainable textiles and recycled plastics.

“Sustainability at scale requires a different kind of engineering—one that considers the full lifecycle of a product, not just its performance on day one.”

This systems-thinking approach laid the groundwork for his next challenge: applying sustainability in an industry where durability and design reign supreme—luxury flooring.

🏢 Re-engineering Flooring for a Sustainable Future

Today, Jamie leads sustainability at Karndean Designflooring, a global leader in high-end vinyl flooring. Flooring presents a unique sustainability challenge: it needs to be durable, aesthetically flexible, and cost-effective—often conflicting with recyclability and material transparency.

🏗 Sustainability Challenges in Flooring:

• Plastics & Chemical Use – PVC-based products must meet high safety and durability standards while minimising environmental impact.
• End-of-life Waste – Most flooring materials are difficult to recycle due to adhesives and composite layers.
• Carbon Footprint – Reducing emissions across sourcing, manufacturing, and logistics.

To tackle these issues, Jamie is focused on:

✅ Developing closed-loop recycling schemes – ensuring old flooring products don’t end up in landfill.
✅ Innovating with bio-based materials – exploring alternatives to fossil fuel-derived components.
✅ Enhancing product transparency – giving consumers a clear understanding of material origins and impact.

Unlike industries where sustainability is externally mandated, Jamie is working to shift mindsets internally—making sustainability a proactive business advantage rather than a reactive compliance measure.

“If sustainability isn’t built into product design from the start, you’re always playing catch-up. We’re changing that.”

🎯 The Formula for Fast-Track Sustainability

Across F1, automotive, and flooring, Jamie’s approach remains the same:

🏁 Embed sustainability in R&D – don’t treat it as a bolt-on after products are developed.
🏁 Focus on efficiency gains – sustainability should drive business value, not just reduce impact.
🏁 Push for circularity – products should be designed with their end-of-life in mind.

His journey proves that the most competitive industries—those that move the fastest—can also lead the way in sustainability.

“Sustainability isn’t a barrier to performance. In fact, when done right, it drives better results across the board.”