We are faced with meeting the agricultural demands of a growing population estimated to reach 9.8 billion people by 2050 on soils depleted of essential nutrients, with declining yields and a projected reduction in future rainfall in key agricultural regions. A circular economy between agriculture and organic waste streams can recycle essential resources for farming through the recovery of water, biomass, and nutrients from sanitation waste solids, effluents, and livestock manure at scale. This offers benefits to agroecological practices in farming by reducing the reliance on chemical fertiliser inputs with multiple benefits that improve soil health, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from farming, and reduce water pollution in drainage from fields. However, there are potential risks and challenges associated with this solution and these need to be fully understood to enable resource recovery to operate in a safe and sustainable manner in the long term. Firstly, the gastrointestinal tracts of humans and animals are a source of pathogens to the environment and agriculture food chain. So, reusing these wastes could potentially spread these pathogens to the food crops we consume. Secondly, manure and sewage are sources of veterinary and medical chemicals to the environment; these compounds can enhance a microbe's ability to resist treatment drugs, such as antibiotics. This ability to resist treatment drugs can spread to other microbes important for plant, animal, and human diseases. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global public health crisis that is predicted to cause 10 million deaths per year by 2050. Currently, livestock and the environment are recognised as reservoirs of antimicrobial resistant microbes and implicated in the dissemination of these AMR microbes. Science-based methods to assess the environmental, livestock and human health risks of combined exposure to antimicrobial selective compounds and AMR microbes are therefore central to fully realising the potential benefits of a sanitation-agriculture circular economy. Models, analytical tools, and quantitative assessment methods to understand, measure and assess the impacts of agricultural exposure routes urgently warrant scientific attention. Through understanding the safety risks recycling waste streams pose, new interventions can be devised to minimise these risks, making resource recycling a viable mechanism to increase soil and farm productivity. Working with water utility companies and the National Pig Centre, we will investigate how water and farm waste can be recycled to be used in agriculture. Using laboratory models, we will identify where pathogens and chemicals aggregate along the different waste streams, thus identify where interventions need to be made. Using this information, we will define a risk assessment analysis to tackle pathogen and chemical buildup. We propose to build on the 'one-health, one environment' approach to AMR by acknowledging the connectivity between humans, animals and the environment. This project will support the development of a UK sanitation-circular economy and build a UK-led innovation network with global reach. The overall aim of the project is to build a community of educational, industry, farming, and government colleagues to increase the capacity of the UK to address global pollution challenges associated with adopting a circular economy to support agricultural production. A circular economy approach is essential in meeting global agricultural needs, especially enhancing the role that farming can play in climate control and our need to move towards Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions. This proposal will pave the way in achieving this goal whilst minimising the impact of utilising waste materials on the environment and animal and human health.

In the developed world most people are able to take the supply of safe clean drinking water for granted, most of the time. However water quality failures do occur and there are associated health risks. The analysis of water samples, taken at the customers tap by the UK Water Industry to meet regulatory requirements, has shown that for three consecutive years approximately 1 in every 200 samples failed to meet the standards for coliforms, an indicator of faecal contamination. The few epidemiologic studies in the area confirm that there is a problem and that it is related to the pipe infrastructure. This pipe infrastructure, used to deliver this basic human resource, is an extremely complicated mix of materials, pipe sizes and structures and appurtenances that are connected in a network, usually in loops, developed in a piecemeal manner over considerable time. This infrastructure is integral to our towns and cities and widespread replacement is unfeasible due to the associated costs and disruption. Whi1e there is existing knowledge and tools for understanding and making some predictions of the structural performance of these assets, the knowledge and applicable understanding of their water quality related performance is extremely poor.This system of buried infrastructure acts as a dynamic physical, microbiological and chemical reactor, with high surface area and with highly variable residence times. As a consequence there are a number of major and interacting physical and bio-chemical processes that degrade the quality of drinking water as it is transported. The situation is further complicated by the unknown, but deteriorating, internal condition of the infrastructure. This Challenging Engineering vision will enable the applicant to establish a world leading multidisciplinary team to derive new knowledge of the physical bio-chemical reactions and interactions occurring within water distribution systems, dominated by the aging infrastructure. The team will integrate across engineering and microbiological, chemical and computer science. Extensive use will be made of the latest instrumentation and measurement techniques from the different disciplines, applied to experimental studies on the internationally unique, 600m long temperature controlled pipe test loop facility at the University of Sheffield and ambitious live field trials with UK water companies (both areas of particular expertise of the applicant). The new understanding and knowledge gained will be applied to develop a suite of analysis and predictive tools to drive a paradigm shift in the way in which water distribution systems are operated, managed, rehabilitated and maintained for water quality with a move towards proactive management operating in near real time.The project is extremely ambitious, but presents the opportunity for the UK to establish an area of international expertise and to lead the world in an expanding research area of public interest and significance. The most apparent output will be superior water quality at least cost, consistent with the demands of an increasingly well informed society, leading to enhanced public health and well being. In the longer term, the multidisciplinary team will evolve by seeking to further develop the multidisciplinary approach for the even more complex environments of the complete urban water cycle and seek to stimulate further change for integrated, holistic and sustainable management across the cycle.

A consortium of teams from 6 universities aims to achieve major advances in a technology that potentially produces electricity directly from sustainable biological materials and air, in devices known as biological fuel cells. These devices are of two main types: in microbial fuel cells micro-organisms convert organic materials into fuels that can be oxidised in electrochemical cells, and in enzymatic fuel cells electricity is produced as a result of the action of an enzyme (a biological catalyst). Fuels that can be used include (1) pure biochemicals such as glucose, (2) hydrogen gas and (3) organic chemicals present in waste water.The Consortium programme involves a unique combination of microbiology, enzymology, electrochemistry, materials science and computational modelling. Key challenges that the Consortium will face include modelling and understanding the interaction of an electrochemical cell and a population of micro-organisms, attaching and optimising appropriate enzymes, developing and studying synthetic assemblies that contain the active site of a natural enzyme, optimising electrode materials for this application, and designing, building and testing novel biological fuel cells.A Biofuel Cells Industrial Club is to be formed, with industrial partners active in water management, porous materials, microbiology, biological catalysis and fuel cell technology. The programme and its outcomes will be significant steps towards producing electricity from materials and techniques originating in the life sciences. The technology is likely to be perceived as greener than use of solely chemical and engineering approaches, and there is considerable potential for spin off in changed technologies (e.g. cost reductions, reduction in the need for precious metals, biological catalysts for production of hydrogen by electrolysis).

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The water industry is the fourth most energy intensive secotr in the UK and uses approximately 2 -3 % of net UK electricity releasing approximately four million tonnes of green house gas emissions (carbon dioxide equivalent) every year. The industry is making progress to produce more renewable energy from its waste biomass sources. However, only 493 GWh was generated by water utilities in the UK in 2005/06 about 6.4 % of its actual requirements. The government has called for research into potentially more efficient energy generation technologies from biomass which would contribute significantly to the UK's policy objectives of 10% of electricity supply from renewable energy by 2010 and for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Innovative research into low carbon treatment and production and storage and use of biogas in the water sector has the potential to offer step-change benefits to the UK's energy system. This project seeks to secure a paradigm shift in wastewater treatment and biogas application. A pilot scale feasibility study is proposed to examine: (1) the fundamental operation of an anaerobic bioreactor using fortified influent wastewater; and (2) increasing the energy-production capacity of the generated renewable biogas. This approach significantly alters the wastewater treatment flow-sheet by reducing dependence on the energy intensive activated sludge process. The project has the potential for UK energy savings of 0.12 kWh per cubic metre of wastewater treated. Over 1 million cubic metres of wastewater are treated every day which potentially corresponds to savings of 438GWh per year and 188,469 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. This is approximately equivalent to off setting 122,000 people flying London to New York return. Potentially fortified anaerobic treatment will also yield >10 % more biogas than is currently available from anaerobic digesters. Therefore, it is important to increase its energy production capacity in line with government developments for local energy and increased energy security. Currently biogas is used in combined heat and power in the UK water sector but biogas use in fuel cells, as a transport gas and for gas supply could provide greater flexibility and efficiency with more storage opportunities. However, these applications require biogas to be upgraded. This project seeks to examine in-situ methane enrichment to provide a better economy of scale for upgrading biogas and thereby maximising the overall energy production capacity of wastewater carbon. This project will therefore help to provide the 'scientific advance and industrial innovation to utilise biomass to meet the increasing demands for sustainable products from renewable sources' called for by the government.