UK FIRES is a 5-year research programme funded by £5m of UKRI support and the subscriptions of an active and growing industrial consortium. With academics from six universities spanning from materials engineering through data science to economics, corporate strategy and policy and an industry consortium spanning from mining through construction and manufacturing to final goods.

UK FIRES takes a pragmatic approach: they focus only on technologies that are available today and exclude those that have yet to be proven at meaningful scale, since they simply may not be ready in time. In 2050 they aim to meet the energy demand of UK society by non-emitting electricity generation

C-THRU is a 3-year, US$4m, international research project which aims to deliver foresight on the future interventions and innovation opportunities in the petrochemical sector required to minimise greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This will be achieved by delivering the world’s most comprehensive, reliable and transparent account of current and future emissions for the global petrochemical sector. This account and the underlying modelling methods, tools and data will support strategic policy and business decision-making to promote the sustainability of the petrochemical sector, making it compatible with climate change mitigation goals.

There aren’t official statistics about plastics in the UK, and only disparate publications from PlasticsEurope and Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) show us snapshots of a few stages along the supply chain of plastics. The data are still insufficient to tell us how much and which types of plastics are used every year, where they came from, on what products they are used and how they are disposed of. And knowing this is essential to identify what problems are being caused by plastics and what opportunities exist to mitigate them.

For this report, we had to conciliate available data on plastics with UK trade statistics in order to estimate the polymer composition in annual trade flows. By doing this, we were able to trace the flows of various polymers from production to transformation, use, and disposal.

LCCT is a three-month project, funded by an EPSRC IAA Impact Starter Grant, which aims to create a new methodology for assessing potential of low-carbon concrete, test this with industrial practitioners, and develop this into a pre-standard to be used by the wider industry.

The Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging from Plants (S2UPPlant) project led by Prof James Elliott (PI, Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy), Prof Paul Dupree (CoI, Department of Biochemistry ) and Dr Jonathan Cullen (CoI, Department of Engineering) will research into changing the genetics of plants or blend with other materials from food or agricultural waste. The aim is to engineer materials with new functional properties, such as improved strength or better protection, reducing the volume of plastic packaging needed to keep food fresh.

TransFIRe (Transforming Foundation Industries Research and Innovation hub) was developed in response to the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund call to transform the Foundation Industries: Chemicals, Cement, Ceramics, Glass, Metals and Paper.

This programme will develop a self-sustaining Hub of expertise to support the Foundation Industries’ transformation into non-polluting, resource efficient modern competitive manufactories working in harmony with the communities in which they are situated, providing attractive places to be employed with unparalleled ED&I performance.

Within the steel industry, leading companies and professional bodies have sought to promote and embody the circular economy to advance sector sustainability. One way to achieve this aim is via a more holistic approach to resource management. This requires the development of alternative conceptual frameworks such as the SFS nexus.

The SFS nexus explicitly highlights the interactions including trade-offs, between energy and material flows (e.g. coal, iron ore), material stocks (e.g. buildings, vehicles) and service provision (e.g. shelter, mobility). This project aims to comprehensively evaluate the extent of which the SFS nexus can support the steel sector’s positioning in the circular economy; determine the feasibility of achieving circularity for a specific Tata Steel product line; model future steel availability and demand under various circular economy scenarios.

We have created an exergy calculator which returns values of chemical exergy for a wide range of materials. The database of exergy values, includes all known published literature values for substances and calculates additional values based on published compositions of more complex materials. Where values differ, a range is given, along with the specific referenced values, to allow the user to choose the most appropriate value.

A buildings energy committee at the University of Cambridge conceived the Energy Cost Metric (ECM) which seeks to bridge the performance gap between cost and energy considerations in a transparent and effective manner. The ECM relates the total lifecycle energy required to construct, operate, maintain and take-down the building, to the construction costs using the formula: F=E+C/α,  where 𝐹 is the objective function, 𝐸 captures whole-life energy, 𝐶 building capital cost, and 𝛼 is a weighted factor related to the anticipated cost of energy. The metric is agnostic to the scale and detail of considered design options and was put into application at West Cambridge Development Site to guide design decisions from initial stage to construction.