A recent study by UK universities found that cooling currently accounts for 10-20% of the country's energy consumption, and the demand for cooling is expected to increase several-fold in the coming years. The Imperial College's Demand.ninja model shows that London is experiencing the fastest increase in cooling demand worldwide, mainly due to frequent and severe heatwaves. A separate study from the University of Oxford warns that the UK is unprepared for a 30% relative increase in cooling demand, the third-largest globally, after Ireland and Switzerland. Additionally, emerging sectors such as hydrogen production require significant cooling for efficient storage and distribution, with the production of ammonia as a hydrogen carrier being a high cooling demand process at 2.8 GJ/ton-ammonia. Cooling is an energy intensive practice. If we continue to use grid electricity to power cooling systems, along with the increasing demand for other uses like electric vehicles, the grid will become significantly strained, hindering its decarbonisation. The Reef-UKC network aims to lead research in discovering the next generation of renewable energy technologies to meet the growing demand for cooling. We'll undertake evidence-based, multidisciplinary research using pump-priming funds and networking activities to leverage renewable energy sources for cooling. Our research will maximise system-level integration benefits while addressing the unique challenges of the UK's economic, environmental, societal, behavioural, and political contexts. Since cooling is a multidimensional challenge, we will focus on several fronts (F) to achieve our goals. F1: Develop efficient renewable-powered cooling system-level solutions to meet the existing and future demand for cooling, specifically in rapidly growing sectors, e.g., Hydrogen, data centres. F2: Consider environmental and social impacts and behavioural changes. F3: Contemplate Cold economy, business modelling, sustainability, and design for circularity. F4: Integrate the developed solutions with the developed cooling (and potentially heating) networks approaches by other research initiatives. F5: Develop policies and regulatory frameworks to incentivise the adoption of the technology packages and communication with the UK government and local authorities.

Technology critical metals (TCMs) are pivotal to achieving Net Zero goals. These metals include for example lithium, cobalt, rare earths and platinum group metals. TCMs are deemed to be "critical" because they are economically important but at risk of short supply. The UK Government's Net Zero Strategy: "Build Back Greener" (2021) highlights the supply of these materials as a key challenge for the UK's energy transition and the need for a circular economy in these materials. They are used in wind-power, EV motors and batteries, LEDs, solar-cells and the hydrogen economy. The Government's (2022) Critical Minerals Strategy, "Resilience for the Future", emphasises the importance of these materials and the global supply-chain pressures. The UK's first critical mineral list identified 18 elements as TCMs (British Geological Survey, 2022). Currently, recycling rates for TCMs are very low, for example < 5% for neodymium , used in rare earth magnets ("Critical Raw Materials Resilience" EU report). There are a number of reasons for this, including a lack of specific incentives or legislation, current product designs often impede separation, in some applications there is a very low concentration of the critical material, often the value chains are fragmented, and current recycling processes, designed for bulk metals, are rather crude resulting in the finely distributed TCMs being lost in a linear economy. The overarching aim of RECREATE is to develop a circular economy for TCMs, keeping the materials or components in the highest value form with the lowest environmental footprint. The project brings together three of the leading research institutes in the UK (Universities of Birmingham, Leicester and Edinburgh) who each specialise in different technologies for the extraction and re-use or recycling of TCMs. The project includes leading industrial and public-sector players and policy makers, all involved in the drive to create a circular economy for critical materials in the UK. The research is informed by a system-wide perspective derived from a deep understanding of the industrial challenges for recycling of these materials, and of the governance structures that drive a circular economy. This project will undertake low TRL transformative research to generate radical improvements in automated sorting, "short loop" recycling, pyrometallurgical and chemical processes with reduced environmental impact, biological processes for dilute effluents, and new materials and product-designs which make re-use or recycling easier. Ultimately the project is developing a toolbox of technologies which can sense, sort, separate and re-use or recycle a broad range of TCMs from a wide range of products. These new technologies will be benchmarked using life cycle and techno economic assessment and the legislative drivers for a circular economy will be explored.

The Circular Economy requirements and sustainability goals have been set out by the UK government and the United Nations to address the climate crisis and maintain our standard of living. The environmental impact from the global consumption of engineering materials is expected to double in the next forty years (OECD: Global Material Recourses to 2060, 2018), while annual waste generation is projected to increase by 70% by 2050 (World Bank What a Waste 2.0 report, 2018). A radical departure from traditional forward manufacturing is needed that no longer exclusively focuses on the original manufacturing process and the end of life dispose of manufactured products, parts, and materials. Processes are needed that will significantly prolong the useful life of engineering and especially critical materials (minerals with high economic vulnerability and high global supply risk e.g. rare earth elements for batteries, magnets and medical devices) by increasing the effectiveness of reuse, repurpose, repair, remanufacture, and recycle (Re-X) manufacturing processes. These Re-X processes are currently 3-6 times more labour intensive than traditional manufacturing processes. They are often not economic resulting in many engineering materials being disposed on landfill sites, degraded, or incinerated. UK businesses could benefit by up to £23 billion per year through low cost or no cost improvements in the efficient use of resources. The vision of this hub is to pursue an integrated, holistic approach toward creating a new manufacturing ecosystem for circular resource use of high value products through advances in AI and intelligent automation, empowering the UK to be a world leader in circular manufacturing. To deliver this ambition the hub will focused on two grand challenges: GC1: Radically transform the sustainable use of critical materials. (Goal: >75% Critical components reuse; >20% critical material use decrease; >50% component reclaim increase). GC2: Radically improve the productivity of Re-X manufacturing processes on par with or exceeding traditional forward manufacturing processes (Goal: >10 times improvement). To address these, the hub will establish a truly interdisciplinary team cutting across Manufacturing, Robotics, AI and Automation, Materials Science, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Economics, and Life Cycle Assessment.?The hub will focus on three major fronts: Research excellence, community building and user engagement. The new research required to address the grand challenges and overcome the barriers and limitations preventing the transition to a truly circular manufacturing ecosystem will investigate: - New smart processes for disassembly, remanufacturing, separation, and recovery of critical products, components, and ultimately materials. - New sensing and analysis processes to track and determine the state of critical materials throughout their life. - New design methodologies for circular manufacturing. - New testing and validation methods to certify the remaining useful life of crucial products, components, and materials. - New circular Re-X business models. Our research programme will enable rapid scale up of Robotics and AI solutions that are compatible with sector practice, extensible via modular design, and can be repurposed initially in four flagship sector scenarios: energy, medical devices, electric drives, and large structures. Consequently, this Hub will directly address the 80% of the environmental impact of high-value products (Circular Economy Action Plan, European Union, 2020), and save more than 8M tonnes of CO2 emissions annually (HM Government Building our Industrial Strategy report, 2017).

The decarbonisation of industrial clusters is of critical importance to the UK's ambitions of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. The UK Industrial Decarbonisation Challenge (IDC) of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) aims to establish the world's first net-zero carbon industrial cluster by 2040 and at least one low-carbon cluster by 2030. The Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre (IDRIC) has been formed to support this Challenge through funding a multidisciplinary research and innovation centre, which currently does not exist at the scale, to accelerate decarbonisation of industrial clusters. IDRIC works with academia, industry, government and other stakeholders to deliver the multidisciplinary research and innovation agenda needed to decarbonise the UK's industrial clusters. IDRIC's research and innovation programme is delivered through a range of activities that enable industry-led, multidisciplinary research in cross-cutting areas of technology, policy, economics and regulation. IDRIC connects and empowers the UK industrial decarbonisation community to deliver an impactful innovation hub for industrial decarbonisation. The establishment of IDRIC as the "one stop shop" for research and innovation, as well as knowledge exchange, regulation, policy and key skills will be beneficial across the industry sectors and clusters. In summary, IDRIC will connect stakeholders, inspire and deliver innovation and maximise impact to help the UK industrial clusters to grow our existing energy intensive industrial sectors, and to attract new, advanced manufacturing industries of the future.