There's a common assumption in industrial circles that manufacturers are slow to decarbonise because the technology isn't ready yet. That somewhere down the line, a breakthrough will arrive and make the switch from gas easy. It's a comforting idea, because it puts the problem outside anyone's control. Wait for the science, and the rest will follow.
The trouble is, it isn't true. Not for everything, and not for the areas where the biggest near-term gains are sitting.
The misconception
Walk into most conversations about decarbonising kilns, dryers and furnaces, and you'll hear people talk about hydrogen, carbon capture, or some future fuel that hasn't quite arrived. These are real pathways, and they matter for the long term. But they've become a kind of shield. If the answer is always "we're waiting for the technology," nobody has to explain why proven solutions sitting on the shelf right now aren't being deployed.
Industrial waste heat recovery is the clearest example. This isn't experimental. It isn't five years away. Recent workshop findings from across the ceramics sector put a number on just how much is being left on the table: in batch kilns alone, up to 90% of the heat generated is currently wasted. That's not a technology gap. That's heat going straight out of the exhaust stack while the same site pays to generate more of it from gas.
Proven technologies already available
Waste heat recovery systems, high temperature heat pumps, and industrial energy recovery systems that capture heat from drying processes are all established. They've been engineered, tested, and installed in working factories. At Wienerberger's Warnham brick works, a waste heat to high temperature heat pump system will cut energy consumption per tonne of product by 18% and reduce carbon emissions by 3,700 tonnes a year. That's not a forecast or a pilot study. It's a system running today, recovering heat and water that would otherwise have been lost to the atmosphere.
The same applies to drying and spray drying processes more broadly. These stages consume significant energy across ceramics and similar manufacturing, and the equipment needed to recover that waste heat doesn't require new chemistry or unproven engineering. It requires investment.
The investment gap
This is where the real barrier sits. Industrial process waste heat recovery has a strong commercial case in principle. Energy savings, lower carbon costs, sometimes water recovery on top. But many manufacturers, particularly in energy intensive sectors like ceramics, brick and precast concrete, don't have the internal capital or risk appetite to fund these projects without support.
For a while, that support existed. The Industrial Energy Transformation Fund helped bridge exactly this gap, reducing payback periods and making energy recovery from waste heat financially viable for sites that would otherwise have left it on the transition plan and moved on to something else.
Why cancelled funding matters
That fund has now closed, with no further rounds planned. The effect isn't just the loss of a grant. It's the removal of the one mechanism that was making proven technology affordable to deploy at scale. Projects that were costed, scoped and ready to proceed have, in some cases, simply been shelved. Not because the engineering failed, but because the numbers no longer worked without that capital support.
This is the part of the story that gets missed. When people hear "funding has been cut," they often assume it's a loss for ambitious or speculative projects. In reality, it's frequently the well proven, low risk heat decarbonisation solutions that get cancelled first, precisely because they were the ones that depended on a clear payback calculation. Take away the funding that shortened the payback, and a sound investment turns into one that can't get past the finance committee.
How better policy could unlock deployment
The good news is that this is a solvable problem, and not a particularly novel one. Output based mechanisms, similar to the Contracts for Difference model the UK already runs successfully for renewable electricity, could do for industrial energy efficiency what they've done for offshore wind: turn an uncertain payback into a bankable, predictable revenue stream. Germany and the Netherlands are already running variants of this idea for energy intensive industry, rewarding manufacturers for verified savings rather than handing out one off grants.
None of this requires a technology breakthrough. It requires recognising that waste heat recovery, carbon capture readiness, and other proven decarbonisation tools are sitting idle in factories across the country, not because anyone doubts they work, but because the investment case has been made harder than it needs to be.
Why this matters
The narrative that industry is dragging its feet on decarbonisation because the technology isn't there yet doesn't hold up. The technology exists. Industrial waste heat utilisation is proven, scalable, and already delivering measured results at sites like Warnham. What's missing is an investment environment that lets manufacturers act on what they already know works.
Fix that, and a lot of the "waiting for the future" disappears. The future, in this case, is already running in the plant room.