The Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (IMCRC) will undertake a wide variety of work in the Manufacturing, Construction and product design areas. The work will be contained within 5 programmes:1. Transforming Organisations / Providing individuals, organisations, sectors and regions with the dynamic and innovative capability to thrive in a complex and uncertain future2. High Value Assets / Delivering tools, techniques and designs to maximise the through-life value of high capital cost, long life physical assets3. Healthy & Secure Future / Meeting the growing need for products & environments that promote health, safety and security4. Next Generation Technologies / The future materials, processes, production and information systems to deliver products to the customer5. Customised Products / The design and optimisation techniques to deliver customer specific products.Academics within the Loughborough IMCRC have an internationally leading track record in these areas and a history of strong collaborations to gear IMCRC capabilities with the complementary strengths of external groups.Innovative activities are increasingly distributed across the value chain. The impressive scope of the IMCRC helps us mirror this industrial reality, and enhances knowledge transfer. This advantage of the size and diversity of activities within the IMCRC compared with other smaller UK centres gives the Loughborough IMCRC a leading role in this technology and value chain integration area. Loughborough IMCRC as by far the biggest IMRC (in terms of number of academics, researchers and in funding) can take a more holistic approach and has the skills to generate, identify and integrate expertise from elsewhere as required. Therefore, a large proportion of the Centre funding (approximately 50%) will be allocated to Integration projects or Grand Challenges that cover a spectrum of expertise.The Centre covers a wide range of activities from Concept to Creation.The activities of the Centre will take place in collaboration with the world's best researchers in the UK and abroad. The academics within the Centre will be organised into 3 Research Units so that they can be co-ordinated effectively and can cooperate on Programmes.

The EU generates 12.6 million tonnes of textile waste per year, with only 22% currently collected for reuse or recycling—the rest often incinerated or landfilled. With mandating separate textile collection across the EU by 2025, the collected amount is expected to increase and we must upscale sorting and recycling capacity and efficiency to ensure sustainable recovery of the material. SORT4CIRC’s overall ambition is to improve value creation and cost efficiency through automated sorting and innovative recycling. This will generate new revenue streams for sorters and recyclers by turning non-re-wearable textiles into valuable feedstock for high-value recycling. The project will strive to unlock the current technological gaps for textile identification and value-chain traceability, while providing an overall sound business case driving circularity within the textile value chain (TVC). The use of modern digital technology in the sorting process will make it easier to achieve comprehensive information of the materials and fabrication process steps and integrate it to automated presorting and sorting for recycling processes. The different & complementary techonolgies are interlinked with each other with interoperable architecture to achieve complete traceability. Results generated are cross-checked to ensure reliability and consistency, to make decision over its optimal channel for reuse or recycling. SORT4CIRC gathers all relevant expertise to develop a systemic transformative solution enabling a traceable, circular textile industry: industrial collector and sorter, design for recycling by allowing disassembly, technology developers (machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), imaging, hyperspectral, NIR, multisensors), recyclers (chemical, thermo-mechanical and mechanical), along with specialists in supply chain traking and tracing, digital passports, blockchain technology and IoT, textile business models, trade and LCC/LCA.