“I fractured my face in four different areas. I broke my nose, dislodged my jaw and lost my teeth…just like any rugby accident, really.”
Andy Gomarsall MBE is showing IT Channel Oxygen a photo of his bashed-up features following a serious e-scooter accident in September.
The incident – which Gomarsall suffered rushing back from his long commute for his wife’s 50th birthday – is one of the reasons he is in the process of moving closer to London for his new role “banging heads together” at n2s.
This is perhaps a natural occupation for someone who accumulated 35 caps as England scrum-half before he joined n2s, his father’s company, in 2010.
Spreading the word
Gomarsall switched roles at the Bury St Edmunds-based outfit last summer, as a new CEO arrived at n2s.
Becoming ‘Executive Director of Business and Sustainability’ has freed him up from the day-to-day running of n2s, an IT asset disposal firm with 116 staff, and its sister company Bioscope Technology.
This means he can double down on acting as the industry’s most tireless and visible advocate of all things sustainable and circular.
Indeed, the sheer number of events and meetings Gomarsall’s new role involves has prompted him to embark on relocating his life and family from their current New Forest haven to be nearer n2s’ Reading reuse site.
“One of the reasons I’m moving is because of the nature of how many times you’re commuting and in a rush,” Gomarsall said of the accident, which resulted in him having to have facial surgery.
“London is also the heartbeat for all those conversations, so being close to London is important.
“I’m very fortunate the business has allowed me to get out there and evangelise, and then bring that back into the organisation to work out how we’re going to help.”
Banging heads together
Asked how many events he has attended in the last year, Gomarsall replied “not enough, actually”, however.
“Because it’s such a new area, sustainability and the circular economy as topics are still way below other priorities,” Gomarsall said.
“AI and cyber are right up there. There are so many important technology conversations to have. But the difference now is the fact that we need to embed sustainability in all the technology domains.
“And that’s difficult. That’s the challenge, because they’re so verticalised and there isn’t a mesh that helps them all collaborate across one another – and that’s in the channel but also in their customers.
“So part of the role is, in rugby terms, banging heads together to educate in their own organisations. I find myself doing a lot of that, which I think I was strong at in my previous world and role.
“I’m grateful to the business to allow me to do things like that – and it doesn’t necessarily always equate into [generating] business.”
With father Jack having been in the recycling industry for decades, Gomarsall says his first memories were of telephone exchanges, as well as “hard graft and heavy metal reclamation”. Later, during school holidays, he would earn pocket money lifting cables out of underfloors.
Although joining the family business wasn’t inevitable, Gomarsall says the “laser focus” he exhibited in his rugby career has translated easily from changing room to boardroom.
“Once sports people have been given a bone, they go hard and they’re fully committed,” Gomarsall said.
“I’ve got an ambition. I know where it can go, and I’m laser focused.”
Urban mining vision
So what is the ambition?
For Gomarsall, it is partly about raising the profile of the benefits of urban mining.
While n2s is one of the UK’s larger ITADs, start-up Bioscope Technologies employs 16 staff, many of whom are “young, bright scientists”, Gomarsall said.
The latter is focused on “solving some of the challenges that we have today in the really intricate elements of recycling and refining metals”.
“With the circular economy, there are these cascades and flows of products, and that then turns into material. Unfortunately they’re all very lacking in data,” he explained.
“Today we’re still in that exploratory phase of what the metrics should be. It takes a lot of effort and specialism – and scientists and industry experts – to pull that together. There is no industry standard, across the board, but also from a technology point of view, and I find that astonishing.
“So I spend a lot of time on things that might not necessarily benefit n2s or Bioscope Technologies. I’m doing it because I truly care and I want our customers on that journey to prove it so they can stand there and say it wasn’t just a good story.”
Gomarsall was talking to IT Channel Oxygen at n2s’ UK Technology Sustainability Forum event in London last week, which brought together experts across academia, non-profits and the private sector.
The panel included Matt Manning, Head of Circular Economy at BT, for which n2s claims it extracted 200 tonnes of copper cable in 2023.
“This has got to be a data-driven industry because materials are so important,” Gomarsall said.
“The spike in copper because of AI is insane. We need more copper. Are we saying the strategy is let’s go and dig more up? Or are we saying we have to connect all of those supply chains with recycled copper? And that could come from BT’s estate.
“That’s my vision. We might be a small cog in that, but we’re an important part in its evolution and its innovation.”
Despite the seriousness of his recent accident, Gomarsall returned to work within a week, even before he had the surgery. He admits he was “very fortunate”.
“I won’t sleep until we get there,” Gomarsall concluded of his new mission.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
