12: Delivering Solutions

“We need to be fully conscious of the full life cycle of the products on the planet, not just the tail pipe exhaust part” says Kevin Czinger, Founder of Divergent 3D, a Los Angeles-based 3D manufacturer, summarizing his whole-systems view philosophy. Divergent 3D manufactures cars, currently. Kevin is taking the climate crisis head-on, doing much more than producing EVs (electric vehicles). What was his call to action? To this day, vehicles are built using the same logic and sequential methods as Henry Ford first used over 100 years ago. Factories with massive carbon footprints taking up acres of land and producing huge amounts of harmful carbon emissions still dominate. Even with the excitement around the advent of EVs the core manufacturing process is derived from practices developed in the early 1900s. Kevin and his team examined every phase and each assumption in the production system, including supplier inputs at each stage, to innovate an entirely new approach within a closed-loop cycle, essentially blowing apart the auto industry's century-old business model. Divergent 3D uses new technologies to dramatically decrease material and energy usage and, consequently, has literally reinvented every life-cycle stage of vehicle manufacturing. Kevin believes we must be open to all technologies to help manufacturing overall, not just EVs. The result is a production method called Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS™), a radically new, more sustainable approach to manufacturing that is protected by over 475 patents filings.