Circular Innovation: Dr John Mitchell of IPC On The Role of Zero Waste and Efficiency in Shaping Future Businesses
An Interview With Martita Mestey
Engage with cross-industry groups. We’re always smarter together. Get involved in Sustainability leadership councils, etc. Find out how people have already won the battles you’re just starting to fight so that you can save time and resources.
As businesses face growing pressure to address environmental concerns, the principles of circular innovation have become increasingly vital. By focusing on zero waste and efficiency, companies can not only reduce their ecological footprint but also unlock new opportunities for growth, resilience, and profitability. How can businesses successfully incorporate these strategies to shape a sustainable future? In this interview series, we are talking with industry leaders, sustainability experts, innovators, and entrepreneurs about “Circular Innovation: The Role of Zero Waste and Efficiency in Shaping Future Businesses.” As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. John W. Mitchell.
As IPC’s president and CEO, Dr. John W. Mitchell leads the organization’s global operations and staff. Working with the IPC board of directors, he is responsible for assisting in the development and implementation of the Board’s strategic vision and aspirational goals. He joined IPC as president and CEO in April 2012, and has been instrumental in launching solutions to help IPC’s members achieve financial success and competitive excellence.
Dr. Mitchell has championed IPC programs such as a new learning management platform, IPC EDGE; Validation Services; an Online Certification Portal; and a re-engineered Member Success department. Between creating new solutions that support standards development, improving member relations, and advocating for regulatory change, Dr. Mitchell has generated a more than 50 percent increase in acceptance of standards as measured in revenue collected since 2012, and grown IPC’s global membership by nearly 100 percent to more than 3,000 member companies. His focus on global expansion has also resulted in membership doubling for Asia-based companies to more than 1,000 and more than 600 in Europe.
Dr. Mitchell began his engineering career at General Electric Aerospace in 1988. In 1992, he joined Alpine Electronics and became a founding member of its research company which is credited for introducing navigation systems to the U.S. OEM market. During his tenure at Alpine, he held several positions, including manager of software engineering, director of IT and senior director of strategic planning.
In 2003, Dr. Mitchell was recruited to Bose Corporation where he served as general manager/director of a new global business unit — Bose’s largest-ever product development initiative. Just prior to joining IPC, he served as the CEO of Golden Key International Honour Society, the world’s premier collegiate honor society, with more than 2 million members from more than 190 nations.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. How did you become involved in the circular economy and zero waste initiatives? Can you share your professional background and how it prepared you to innovate in this space?
While I am always in pursuit of learning, initially I studied electrical engineering. I then went on to earn an MBA as well as a doctorate in Education. I worked in business for years, early on at GE and Alpine, and then at Bose. Those experiences were the entry to my current broader work with the electronics industry.
I joined IPC, the global electronics association, 13 years ago. This is an association that has and continues to address the challenges faced by and advance the goals of the entire electronics ecosystem. This work has given me (and our association broadly) the opportunity to talk and collaborate with different portions of the global supply chain and understand their needs and expectations, from both the supplier and customer perspective. Our member companies share what’s happening in their business, including regulatory requirements, market shifts and demands, R&D, etc. This enables us to better understand their businesses and create connections between the businesses or the businesses and policymakers to find achievable solutions to their complex and interacting technologies and systems.
What drives your commitment to promoting efficiency and zero waste in business?
First, we all live on this planet: We each have a responsibility to protect the health of the planet. Central to this is making sure products are safe, made efficiently, and developed in as sustainable a manner as possible.
I am committed to pushing forward “zero waste” solutions. In my industry, we talk about this in terms of circularity and creating efficiencies, as our members do. This commitment is not going away, not a passing fad. IPC recently launched a report, Wired for Change, identifying the state of sustainability in the electronics industry. Sixty percent of respondents expected their companies to continue growing their sustainability efforts this year. What I’m hearing business leaders say is that sustainability is the electronics industry’s future — Electronics is no longer an industry of its own: It’s a resource that’s used by every industry. If we can help make electronics more sustainable and more circular, then electronics — and every industry — is going to benefit.
IPC held a series of events in 2024 and 2025 where we directly engaged with electronics industry stakeholders (academia, government, industry) on the topic of circularity for electronics. What we learned is that the industry is looking to better define metrics for circularity and raising awareness and building capacity for circularity. Also, IPC has standards development activities going on right now on the topic of reclamation.
How does your organization incorporate the principles of the circular economy into its business model?
As the association for the global electronics industry, I hear from members regularly about how they think about and integrate the circular economy into their businesses. Let me talk about this from their perspective as they are the ones making the products.
There are several different ways, starting with some basic things like elimination of waste and pollution. Industry designs products and systems that minimize any waste in the creation of them and use the best materials possible.
They also want to keep products and materials in use. We’re familiar with reduce, reuse, recycle. Well, here, think about it as re-use, recycle, and refurbish. This effort starts in the design phase and continues through refurbishing and recycling. For example, recycling cobalt from old phone batteries rather than extract new cobalt from the ground. While there are good efforts on this front, there’s still much work to be done.
Water and certain chemicals are regularly used to make electronics. We must think about cleaning and returning natural resources. It’s vital to make sure that the water returned to the ecosystem is as good as if not better than the water taken out of the system.
Earlier I referenced the design of the product: thinking about design is where we start to determine how the product may be re-used, refurbished, or recycled. Another element of design is durability. We’re all familiar with the frustration of a cracked screen on a smartphone. In earlier devices, you may have had a to get a new phone. Today, you can replace the screen or glass, which takes less of an environmental toll because it requires less resource extraction. That modular design is a design for longevity and durability of the overall device.
You can also think about this in a bigger scale…autos, airplanes, satellites, the space shuttle. The durability of the electronics systems is critical. It would be challenging, frustrating, cumbersome, and incredibly costly to replace a battery or tweak an electronics system every month in space for example.
Electronics manufacturers are also reducing the use of precious materials and employing renewable energy sources. These types of resource efficiencies are good for both the environment and business’s bottom line.
Can you provide an example of how zero waste practices have improved your business operations or profitability?
Let me share an example from the industry most may be familiar with, that of printer ink and cartridges. This is a good example of the realities — and decisions — electronics manufacturers face. For a long time, we had printers and ink cartridges, and then, fantastically, we had printer ink cartridge recycling. That was a major shift for those manufacturers, and they created an efficient infrastructure. The companies had to determine how they could stand up, implement, and support a system that worked for them. Printer cartridge recycling has gone on a long time, reduced waste, and conserved resources. But recycling infrastructure is expensive and often not the area of expertise of the product developer.
What role does innovation play in advancing zero waste initiatives, and how do you foster that innovation within your company?
Innovation is in the electronics industry’s DNA. Innovation plays an extremely significant role in advancing circularization the electronics industry, thinking about the materials, components, and the final products, and how recycling, refurbishment, and remanufacturing can be accomplished for each. How can that be recycled? Is there a better disposal method? Innovation for recycling of materials is not the same innovation — or technology solution — for recycling of final products.
IPC engages with the electronics industry to gather best practices, and we collaborate with them to learn more about what they’re doing to circularize, whether for materials, components, final products, and whether to recycle or remanufacture or any of the other dozen or so R words!
How do you foster innovation in your company?
Let me use the “carrot and stick” expression to explain the approach. Some innovations result from a forcing mechanism, such as government regulations. Those are a big, heavy incentive because companies must comply to continue doing business, selling product, etc. To this, we try to bring together industry and policymakers together to make sure they’re working together when those regulations come out so that there’s a roadmap to getting there, and a reasonable path to those innovations.
Looking at the carrot approach, there are companies that really stand up and embrace innovation. Three companies come to mind right away: Panasonic, Apple, and Intel.
Apple, in particular, has a very strong track record. For instance, Apple’s approach to implementing safer cleaning chemicals throughout the electronics supply chain eventually led to the development of an industry-wide standard (i.e., IPC-1402, Standard for Green Cleaners Used in Electronics Manufacturing) and associated support for this standard (e.g., the ChemFORWARD clean screen app).
What are the key challenges to implementing circular economy principles in mainstream business models, and how do you address them?
Let me first say that linear business models have been the norm, so any change is difficult. This is a big shift and there need to be economic incentives and ROI to encourage this shift. So, the first challenge is the upfront costs, the investment. But look at the industry. The ecosystem of companies that make up the electronics industry is made up of large, multi-billion-dollar companies, and smaller companies.
The large companies have resources to not only pay for it themselves, but also to lobby governments for contracts to help them upgrade their processes to get support for financial support. These opportunities are often not as available to small- and medium-sized companies.
I would love to see us addressing the high upfront investment costs of circular systems by gradient levels of support from large to small.
The operational complexity of reverse logistics and supply chain management is also particularly challenging. Companies are taking the time to consider the best approach(es) for their businesses and that’s a challenging task.
How do you see circular economy and zero waste practices evolving in the future, and what role do you want your organization to play?
I talked a little bit about the evolution in the previous examples. But the role of our organization is among the most critical elements. How do we as IPC encourage circular economy initiatives to happen faster? This is one way that we use our advocacy communications, standards, and education products and programs.
We advocate between the governments. We communicate. We create more awareness, awareness about the impact of electronics across every industry, awareness of the challenges they face. This way you get larger groups of people working on the same kinds of problems or sharing breakthroughs or best practices.
We have a new offering called Evolve, which allows large and small companies alike to understand what those best practices are to understand where they can get information if they don’t have a team of people that work on circularity because they’re too small to have even one person.
Education is core to Evolve — both education of the people working on the devices to make sure that they know best practices as well as educating policymakers about the challenges they are facing.
What are your “5 Things A Business Needs in Order To Successfully Adopt Zero Waste And Circular Economy Principles”? If you can, please share a story or example for each.
1. Strategy. Set a clear goal. Many people are doing this as we heard during 30 or so interviews with companies about their sustainability efforts during our recent trade show APEX. Almost without fail, they offered specific things, such as “we will be carbon neutral by 2035.” Identifying a clear goal, a clear objective is step one. Sustainability and circularity are too broad to not be specific.
2. Knowledge and Know How. Gather information, such as that available from Evolve, and other associations or groups and government resources to identify regulations and anticipated changes or regulations. Without that information and assessing that information, you end up guessing.
3. Plan. Build a plan based on the goal and information available. The plan needs to integrate many things — not be only factory focused. What other elements are involved? Definitely the workforce. Involve them, state the goal, provide information, and seek input and suggestions. They can generate ideas that leadership may honestly not be aware of that the people down the line see daily. Some innovations…lights on a timer, automatic door closure, filters to clean and reclaim water. The human element is often the forgotten piece that can add those many one percent changes throughout the process to make a strong impact.
4. Feedback loop. Set short-term objectives as part of your goal and communicate those regularly and get feedback. Set a culture of circularity.
5. Engage with cross-industry groups. We’re always smarter together. Get involved in Sustainability leadership councils, etc. Find out how people have already won the battles you’re just starting to fight so that you can save time and resources.
That’s one of the advantages of an association that’s a convener like IPC. Talk over lunch, coffee, or meetings. You can save your company two years of pain just by listening to somebody else who already went through it.
Who or what has been the biggest inspiration in your pursuit of creating a more sustainable, circular business model?
For me, it’s the stories that I’ve heard from industry, the big wins that the world hasn’t heard before. These consist of small and large impacts to our world made in the trenches. Putting water that is cleaner than that received back into the world. Decreasing the energy we consume. Developing new materials that do no harm. We learn from these examples that challenges that looked daunting — become achievable.
If you could implement one big change across industries to accelerate the adoption of the circular economy, what would it be and why?
Here it is: I would take half of the current government subsidies that exist and subsidize electronics manufacturing globally to utilize all the best technology and update that on an every other year basis.
People/companies cannot afford to make frequent changes from their equipment and their processes without funding support.
The reason I choose to sustain the electronics industry first is because the electronics industry impacts the agriculture, aerospace, AI, automotive, computer, medical…it touches all industries.
All the major sectors are drastically impacted using electronics. Your car today is nearly 50% electronics. Your plane doesn’t fly without electronics. You can’t read this article via the Internet without electronics. Let’s make a difference with electronics!
How can our readers further follow your work or your company online?
Get to know us through our Evolve work found at https://www.ipc.org/evolve and take time to learn more about us at IPC.org and on LinkedIn at (3) IPC: Overview | LinkedIn
This was great. Thanks for taking time for us to learn more about you and your business. We wish you continued success!
Circular Innovation: Dr John Mitchell of IPC On The Role of Zero Waste and Efficiency in Shaping… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.