A round-up of Refficiency’s 2024
It’s nearly 2025! It is time again to look back at the past year in the life of the Resource Efficiency Collective. We have published numerous papers, attended conferences internationally, 3 students completed their PhDs (2 of which are now Research Assistants in Refficiency!), and new members have joined.
Row 1 left to right: Refficiency Wales trip in June, Jonathan at the ISIE-SEM conference in September, Petrochemicals & Climate Change Conference in July.
Row 2 left to right: Petrochemicals & Climate Change Conference in July, Refficiency Wales trip in June, Baptiste & Karla’s trip with CCG to Zambia in February.
Month-by-month snapshot
Here are some month-by-month examples of what members of Refficiency got up to this year.
In February Baptiste and Karla went to Zambia with the Climate Compatible Growth Programme to launch a Critical Minerals special interest group.
The C-THRU project on Carbon Clarity in the Global Petrochemical Supply Chain ended in March, after 4 years, with over 15 papers published. Read more about the C-THRU project here.
In May, Ella, Natanael, Luke and Ana travelled to Les Diablerets in Switzerland to present research posters at the Gordon Research Conference in Industrial Ecology.
In June we did a research trip to Wales, with insightful sessions and time spent in nature.
The TransFIRe project wrapped up at the end of June, with a final celebration event at Cranfield University. Research Associate Dr Natanael Bolson has since started a position at the University of Birmingham.
In July, Jonathan co-chaired the Petrochemicals & Climate Change Conference at Fitzwilliam College at the University of Cambridge. This conference was a meeting place for those who take an interest in the central role that the petrochemical and plastics industries play in contributing to the planetary crises of climate change, global pollution and biodiversity loss. Conference attendees came from universities, research institutes and NGOs.
Not bad for a research trip! Left to Right: Les Diablerets in the Swiss Alps, New York, Wales.
In August, Jonathan travelled with former Refficiency member, Dr Fanran Meng (now at the University of Sheffield) and Luke Cullen to China for a research trip. He gave lectures at several universities, including Tsinghua University and China University of Mining and Technology.
In September, Jonathan travelled to New York to attend Climate Week to give a talk at the FUTURE OF THE FOSSIL ECONOMY: THE PETROCHEMICALS, CLIMATE & HEALTH NEXUS event and to launch a $5M seed round with the start up Neutreeno.
Ana Morgado, Scott Jeen and Luke Cullen submitted their PhDs in July, October and November respectively.
In November, in collaboration with Professor Ming Xu of Tsinghua University, Jonathan hosted a UK-China-EU Battery Workshop at the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge.
To celebrate 2024 and the start of the festive period, Refficiency had their Christmas dinner at the beginning of December.
Papers
Here are some of the papers published in Refficiency this year:
Reducing uncertainties in greenhouse gas emissions from chemical production (Luke Cullen, Fanran Meng, Rick Lupton and Jonathan Cullen)
Replacing Plastics With Alternatives Is Worse for Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Most Cases (Dr Fanran Meng, Dr Jonathan Cullen, Dr. Miguel Brandão)
Using open-source tools to project bulk and critical material demand and assess implications for low-carbon energy and transport systems: Introducing Mat-dp model tools (Karla Cervantes Barron, Jonathan Cullen)
Machine learning for gap-filling in greenhouse gas emissions databases (Luke Cullen, Jonathan Cullen, Andrea Marinoni)
Here’s to a productive and collaborative 2025!
Photo credits go to Laura Prestwich, Jonathan Cullen, Ella Jennings, Climate Compatible Growth programme and Lihani du Plessis
