The Circular Economy (CE) is a revolutionary alternative to a traditional linear, make-use-dispose economy. It is based on the central principle of maintaining continuous flows of resources at their highest value for the longest period and then recovering, cascading and regenerating products and materials at the end of each life cycle. Metals are ideal flows for a circular economy. With careful stewardship and good technology, metals mined from the Earth can be reused indefinitely. Technology metals (techmetals) are an essential, distinct, subset of specialist metals. Although they are used in much smaller quantities than industrial metals such as iron and aluminium, each techmetal has its own specific and special properties that give it essential functions in devices ranging from smart phones, batteries, wind turbines and solar cells to electric vehicles. Techmetals are thus essential enablers of a future circular, low carbon economy and demand for many is increasing rapidly. E.g., to meet the UK's 2050 ambition for offshore wind turbines will require 10 years' worth of global neodymium production. To replace all UK-based vehicles with electric vehicles would require 200% of cobalt and 75% of lithium currently produced globally each year. The UK is 100% reliant on imports of techmetals including from countries that represent geopolitical risks. Some techmetals are therefore called Critical Raw Materials (high economic importance and high risk of supply disruption). Only four of the 27 raw materials considered critical by the EU have an end-of-life recycling input rate higher than 10%. Our UKRI TechMet CE Centre brings together for the first time world-leading researchers to maximise opportunities around the provision of techmetals from primary and secondary sources, and lead materials stewardship, creating a National Techmetals Circular Economy Roadmap to accelerate us towards a circular economy. This will help the UK meet its Industrial Strategy Clean Growth agenda and its ambitious UK 2050 climate change targets with secure and environmentally-acceptable supplies of techmetals. There are many challenges to a future techmetal circular economy. With growing demand, new mining is needed and we must keep the environmental footprint of this primary production as low as possible. Materials stewardship of techmetals is difficult because their fate is often difficult to track. Most arrive in the UK 'hidden' in complex products from which they are difficult to recover. Collection is inefficient, consumers may not feel incentivised to recycle, and policy and legislative initiatives such as Extended Producer Responsibility focus on large volume metals rather than small quantity techmetals. There is a lack of end-to-end visibility and connection between different parts of techmetal value chains. The TechMet consortium brings together the Universities of Exeter, Birmingham, Leicester, Manchester and the British Geological Survey who are already working on how to improve the raw materials cycle, manufacture goods to be re-used and recycled, recycle complex goods such as batteries and use and re-use equipment for as long as possible before it needs recycling. One of our first tasks is to track the current flows of techmetals through the UK economy, which although fundamental, is poorly known. The Centre will conduct new interdisciplinary research on interventions to improve each stage in the cycle and join up the value chain - raw materials can be newly mined and recycled, and manufacturing technology can be linked directly to re-use and recycling. The environmental footprint of our techmetals will be evaluated. Business, regulatory and social experts will recommend how the UK can best put all these stages together to make a new techmetals circular economy and produce a strategy for its implementation.

The UK has fallen significantly behind other countries when it comes to adopting robotics/automation within factories. Collaborative automation, that works directly with people, offers fantastic opportunities for strengthening UK manufacturing and rebuilding the UK economy. It will enable companies to increase productivity, to be more responsive and resilient when facing external pressures (like the Covid-19 pandemic) to protect jobs and to grow. To enable confident investment in automation, we need to overcome current fundamental barriers. Automation needs to be easier to set up and use, more capable to deal with complex tasks, more flexible in what it can do, and developed to safely and intuitively collaborate in a way that is welcomed by existing workers and wider society. To overcome these barriers, the ISCF Research Centre in Smart, Collaborative Robotics (CESCIR) has worked with industry to identify four priority areas for research: Collaboration, Autonomy, Simplicity, Acceptance. The initial programme will tackle current fundamental challenges in each of these areas and develop testbeds for demonstration of results. Over the course of the programme, CESCIR will also conduct responsive research, rapidly testing new ideas to solve real world manufacturing automation challenges. CESCIR will create a network of academia and industry, connecting stakeholders, identifying challenges/opportunities, reviewing progress and sharing results. Open access models and data will enable wider academia to further explore the latest scientific advances. Within the manufacturing industry, large enterprises will benefit as automation can be brought into traditionally manual production processes. Similarly, better accessibility and agility will allow more Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) to benefit from automation, improving their competitiveness within the global market.

This proposal seeks to provide a platform for strategic research and impact activities within the embedded integrated intelligent systems (EIIS) domain. This research area covers all aspects of designing and developing products and processes that can demonstrate adaptation and learning (i.e. in terms of self - organising, adapting, configuring, optimising, protecting and healing), at the system or service level based upon intelligent sensing and actuation at the granularity of the individual components. The multidisciplinary nature of the domain is challenging since successful deployment and adoption within the harsh industrial environment requires advancements in several areas (e.g. (1) materials, antennae design, embedded power sources, energy harvesting, real-time software architectures, embedded processing and robust wireless communications protocols at the device level and (2) optimisation, visualisation, analytics, machine learning and digital manufacturing at the systems science and services level). The EIIS group at Loughborough University was founded in 2007 and currently comprises 35 staff (academics (A), post doctoral research associates (PDRA) and postgraduate research students (PhD)). This proposal will enable the team to develop the EIIS strategic research agenda in line with industrial collaborators' (e.g. automotive, electronics, aerospace, sport, healthcare and end of life processing), EPSRC and Government strategies via "ideas factory" colloquia, short-term feasibility studies into "hot topics" and multi-disciplinary responsive-mode submissions to funding bodies (e.g. EPSRC, innovateUK, EU, APC/BIS, Wellcome). The funding will also support the development of a pipeline of expertise in EIIS for UK industry and academia. Undergraduates will be supported via internships in industry or academia to expose the next generation of talent to the EIIS opportunities and challenges and also provide research resource for junior members of the EIIS group. Current EIIS members will also be funded to attend technical, business and innovation courses provided by academia and / or industry and encouraged to take long term (i.e. 3 month) sabbaticals within industry and alternative world leading academic or technology transfer institutions to enable the group to identify best global practices and determine relevant benchmarks for success of the research.