The answer to the current Raw Material supply challenge faced today in Europe, lies in technological innovations that increase the efficiency of resource utilization and allow the exploitation of yet untapped resources such as industrial waste streams and metallurgical by-products. One of the key industrial residues which is currently not or poorly valorised is Bauxite Residue (BR, more commonly known as “red mud”) from alumina refineries. Bauxite residue reuse solutions do exist as stand-alone but pooling them together in an integrated manner is the only way to render bauxite residue reuse viable from an economical point of view and acceptable for the industry The RemovAl project will combine, optimize and scale-up developed processing technologies for extracting base and critical metals from such industrial residues and valorising the remaining processing residues in the construction sector. In term of technological aspects, RemovAl will process several by-products from the aluminium sector and from other metallurgical sectors in Europe (SiO2 by-products, SPL, fly ash,and others). The different waste streams will be combined to allow for optimal and viable processing in different technological pilot nodes. The technologies and pilots in most cases have already been developed in previous or ongoing projects and through RemovAl they will be pooled together and utilized in a European industrial symbiosis network. In term of societal or non-technological aspects, RemovAl will gather key sectors like the non-ferrous metal and cement sectors in order to secure a true industrial symbiosis through a top-down approach considering also legislation and standardisation at European level in order to facilitate the implementation of the most promising technical solutions.

The majority of workers express dissatisfaction with their shared workplace design, which harms their health, wellbeing, productivity and social relations. So-called ‘adaptive’ workplace technologies try to manage these health risks by automating a wide range of architectural building services. However, there is severe lack of concrete evidence on how the short- and longer-term impact of such adaptive architectural technologies on health and wellbeing can be objectively measured, and then become benchmarked and optimized for a variety of hybrid workplace contexts. SONATA therefore aims to generate evidence-based recommendations on the use of architectural adaptation as technological intervention that can benefit human health and well-being in the workplace. Firstly, SONATA aims to measure, quantify and increase the range of health and well-being benefits of the separate and combined effects of state-of-the-art architectural adaptations on four different building shearing layers. Secondly, SONATA will generate empirical knowledge on how these multiple co-located adaptations can be intertwined together so that their health and wellbeing impact is greater than the sum of the separate layers. Lastly, SONATA investigates how these positive effects can become equitably negotiated between the varying - and often conflicting - work situations that must co-exist in a shared workplace. To ensure the resulting recommendations are feasible, easily adoptable and cost-effective to implement, SONATA will involve the pro-active participation and critical analysis from a well-considered selection of key target group representatives, such as workers, OSH-responsibilities, OEM and OHP experts, architects, workplace organisation innovators, adaptive technology manufacturers, and building certification consultants.

Unwanted fires continue to account for a significant loss of life, damage to property, damage to business and damage to the environment. Meanwhile the cost of prevention and protection measures adds a substantial drain to an already struggling economy. The cost of fire is almost 1% of GDP while the cost of fire safety measures for a new building is around 2.5%. The action required to prevent such losses is expensive and may involve inappropriate or unnecessary measures. To address specific threats, such as fires in public buildings, or resulting from terrorism it is essential to improve our understanding of the behaviour of unwanted fires particularly the transition to under-ventilated flaming and the rapid increase in toxicity. Most fire deaths and most fire injuries actually result from inhalation of toxic gases. If reliable means of predicting toxic product yields in real-scale fires were developed, lives could be saved and costs reduced. Combustion toxicity is generally underestimated in small-scale tests, and is highly dependent on fire conditions. The project will quantify combustion toxicity using the unique design of the steady state tube furnace (SSTF) (ISO TS 19700), which allows full-scale fire behaviour, under different fire conditions, to be replicated on a small scale. Crucially, it will also use UCLan's new custom-designed Large Instrumented Fire Enclosure (LIFE) facility based at Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service's Training Centre to investigate the relationship between scales as a function of temperature and ventilation condition. This apparatus is based on a half-scale ISO 9705 room with corridor, as a reference scenario for generation of toxic products from fire, in order to validate bench-scale (ISO 19700) data for use in engineering hazard calculations, and provide crucial information on the behaviour of under-ventilated fires. The outcomes of the work have direct relevance to the fire safety engineering community (in order to predict escape times based on fire toxicity and visual obscuration) while understanding the transition to highly toxic, under-ventilated fires will save lives, and reduce costs. It will also provide materials scientists with the tools to optimise products for lower fire toxicity suitable for high risk application such as mass transport or high rise buildings.