Waste management is changing rapidly as the need to manage the earth's resources responsibly becomes increasingly accepted and enshrined in new legislation. Ideally, changes to the law, regulation and practice would be science-led; but in such a dynamic environment, scientific understanding and engineering know-how sometimes struggle to provide support with the result that the potential consequences of legislative and financial drivers for change may not be fully thought-through. For example, the EU Landfill Directive was enacted mainly to reduce fugitive greenhouse gas emissions from landfills, but its implementation with current treatment options could have the opposite effect. The aim of the Platform Grant is to provide the University of Southampton Waste Management Research Group with the stability and flexibility needed to explore new directions for its research that will provide the waste industry with the science and engineering needed for sustainable response to financial, regulatory and social drivers, and will address the legacy of unsolved problems arising from previous waste management practices. Key areas for development are:1) Field scale implementation of current research - enabling a rapid response when suitable study sites arise: We have developed the science needed by industry to reduce the long term pollution liability of landfills by a variety of remediation techniques, including flushing and in situ aerobic treatment. While excellent progress has been made, major uncertainties remain in upscaling from the laboratory to the field. This will be addressed in future research, in which we plan to investigate flushing and aeration at the field scale by running trials within discrete, bounded areas of MSW landfill(s) with the aim of significantly reducing the long term polluting potential of the wastes. 2) Resource recovery - second generation bio-based products and energy carriers from organic wastes and post-landfill processing: Government policy and strategic waste planning has highlighted a vital role for energy and commodity grade resource recovery in UK waste management practice. The infrastructure to facilitate this is already taking shape, through source segregated collection systems, growing markets for recovered products and pricing structures (e.g. ROC and feed-in tariffs) to encourage renewable energy production. The technology, however, is still in its infancy and underpinning research is urgently needed to support process engineering design, adapt existing technologies and exploit the potential for using waste as a raw material for biorefineries and solid recovered fuels. This will be done within an overall energy, materials and product recovery framework to include MSW processing operations where source segregation is not practised and also post-land filled wastes to reduce their long-term pollution potential and to create additional void space. 3) Application of recent and ongoing research to new forms of wastes - identifying key synergies: There is immense potential for translating the results of our current research into new areas, in particular in characterisation and near field contaminant transport modelling of low and very low level radioactive wastes.4) Development/promotion of a Sustainable Waste/Resource Management Forum including decision support systems (DSS - establishing expertise and stakeholder engagement, and maximising impact: DSS will make the results of the Group's research more readily available to users, encouraging knowledge transfer and maximising impact. Little work has been done to develop DSS for the waste industry, although the potential benefits have been recognised by some. DSS will also facilitate policy and operational decisions on the complex technology and process options available

Complex microbial communities underlie natural processes such as global chemical cycles and digestion in higher animals, and are routinely exploited for industrial scale synthesis, waste treatment and fermentation. Our basic understanding of the structures, stabilities and functions of such communities is limited, leading to the declaration of their study as the next frontier in microbial ecology, microbiology, and synthetic biology. Focusing on biomethane producing microbial communities (BMCs), we will undertake a two-tiered approach of optimising natural communities and designing synthetic communities with a focus on achieving robust, high-yield biomethane production. Within this biotechnological framework, our proposal will address several fundamental scientific questions on the link between the structure and function of microbial communities. To ensure success in this challenging project, we assembled the strongest possible interdisciplinary research team that combines significant practical and scientific expertise in microbial ecology and evolution, systems modelling, molecular microbiology, bioengineering, genomics, and synthetic biology. We are confident that this team will deliver and that this project will result in significant impact in the scientific and industrial domains. Through our work, described in detail below, we will; significantly improve the current understanding of the structure-function relation in microbial communities, provide the scientific community with a systematic, temporal genomics and transcriptomics dataset on complex microbial communities, develop novel computational tools for microbial community (re)design, and experimentally build synthetic BMCs that will act as model ecosystems in different research fields. These scientific developments, in turn, will accumulate in the development of more sustainable bioenergy solutions for the UK economy by optimising the communities underlying biomethane production. This will help to drive the efficiency of biomethane as an alternative fuel source.

Complex microbial communities underlie natural processes such as global chemical cycles and digestion in higher animals, and are routinely exploited for industrial scale synthesis, waste treatment and fermentation. Our basic understanding of the structures, stabilities and functions of such communities is limited, leading to the declaration of their study as the next frontier in microbial ecology, microbiology, and synthetic biology. Focusing on biomethane producing microbial communities (BMCs), we will undertake a two-tiered approach of optimising natural communities and designing synthetic communities with a focus on achieving robust, high-yield biomethane production. Within this biotechnological framework, our proposal will address several fundamental scientific questions on the link between the structure and function of microbial communities. To ensure success in this challenging project, we assembled the strongest possible interdisciplinary research team that combines significant practical and scientific expertise in microbial ecology and evolution, systems modelling, molecular microbiology, bioengineering, genomics, and synthetic biology. We are confident that this team will deliver and that this project will result in significant impact in the scientific and industrial domains. Through our work, described in detail below, we will; significantly improve the current understanding of the structure-function relation in microbial communities, provide the scientific community with a systematic, temporal genomics and transcriptomics dataset on complex microbial communities, develop novel computational tools for microbial community (re)design, and experimentally build synthetic BMCs that will act as model ecosystems in different research fields. These scientific developments, in turn, will accumulate in the development of more sustainable bioenergy solutions for the UK economy by optimising the communities underlying biomethane production. This will help to drive the efficiency of biomethane as an alternative fuel source.

Freshwater ecosystems provide critical ecosystem services that underpin human societies and wellbeing: including water purification, carbon capture, and the maintenance of sustainable fisheries. However, these ecosystems are under an increasing array of threats, both in the UK and worldwide, especially from a wide range of new and emerging chemical stressors (e.g. novel antibiotics and pesticides). Freshwater biosciences and applied ecology are under-equipped for dealing with these new threats: the evidence base is lacking, there is often little or no mechanistic understanding, or predictive capacity for anticipating how these novel chemicals will operate in the real world. This is particularly true for the ecosystems of the future that are being reshaped and constructed by climate and other environmental changes. Our project will address all these shortcomings by taken a radically different approach from the classical biomonitoring and ecotoxicology tools that have dominated for many decades. We aim to unearth the general rules by which emerging chemical stressors operate through, and alter, networks of interacting species - from microbes at the base of the food web, through to apex predators in the fish community at the top. This will involve the development of indicators of both proximate pollution, as the chemical first enters the biological system (commonly as a new food source for microbes), and also of its indirect effects as its impact propagates through the food web. For instance, we will be able to answer questions such as: if a new insecticide wipes out the invertebrates in the middle of the food web, does this trigger blooms of nuisance algae as they are no longer kept in check? To achieve this, we will develop a new suite of methods at the ecosystem level that combine lab and field experiments to detect the causal mechanisms that we currently do not understand. The experiments will be combined with mathematical modelling to predict ecosystem-level impacts. We will address both, contemporary ecosystems that could be under imminent threat from new chemical stressors, and ecosystems of the future that will emerge under different scenarios of land-use and climate change. This will provide a completely new paradigm in chemical stressor monitoring, based on using first principles to derive a novel means of predicting "ecological surprises" that commonly arise due to the inadequacies of our current simplistic approaches when dealing with the true biocomplexity of natural systems. Our scope is for our approach to serve as a diagnostic tool for management, with research findings, for example, supporting the selection of mitigation options that deliver reduction of ecological effects. This paradigm shift will allow far more robust predictions and therefore more informed management decisions about the freshwaters of the future. The work will bring together the field of pure and applied ecological science, to the mutual benefit of both sets of disciplines. Our proposal represents the first steps along this path to the more multidisciplinary perspective that is going to be critical for dealing with future threats to our ecosystems - from emerging chemical stressors in freshwaters to the growing list of other environmental threats looming on the horizon. Because the approach is general, it will not only pave the way for the next generation of ecological assessment in freshwaters, but it can also be adapted for applications in marine and terrestrial ecosystems.

The central aim of the proposed research is to maximise the use of biowastes as a nutrient resource and enable long-term food security in the UK, whilst ensuring food safety and environmental and soil sustainability. The vision is to achieve a paradigm shift where biowastes are no longer considered as a waste, but as a nutrient resource, and used sustainably to ensure food security beyond 2020. Using nutrients from wastes is essential to close the nutrient loop, and in the case of P, the global supply is limited, and its sustainable use has been placed in the top three emerging environmental issues. The research will adopt a 'whole systems approach', encompassing the treatment e.g. AD or MBT, of biowastes from a range of commercial, industrial or municipal sources, through to the soil-plant interactions of biowastes, nutrients and contaminants, to develop innovative and creative processes to improve nutrient content and availability, and minimise contaminant contents, availability and impacts. A key aspect will be minimising risks to the environment when biowastes are used as a nutrient resource; we will use state of the art techniques to examine the fate of nutrients and contaminants in biowaste and amended soil to maximise the agronomic value and protect the environment. The collaborative relationships combine world-leading expertise in waste treatment technologies in AD (University of Southampton) and MBT (University of Leeds) with world-leading expertise in the agronomic and environmental impact of using the resources produced by these processes as a nutrient source (Imperial College London and University of Reading). This collaboration presents unique opportunities for manipulating and managing treatment processes so that, in addition to achieving the other objectives of the process (e.g. maximising biogas production during anaerobic digestion), the nutrient value of the residues is maximised but at minimal risk to the environment. Complementary skills and techniques will be applied to investigate the agronomic and environmental impact of using waste as an environmental resource. For example, expertise at Imperial in quantitative agronomic assessments of nutrient availability by incubation, plant bioassays and field trials, will complement techniques used at Reading such as molecular microbial ecology, isotope ratio mass spectrometry and GC-MS. Within the Catalyst Grant, the collaborating institutions will review the current state of knowledge on recycling nutrient resources in waste, each focusing on their areas of expertise and role in the strategy for the full proposal. This presents a unique opportunity to combine the different aspects together in a cohesive, integrated and holistic assessment. The planned innovative and interdisciplinary programme addresses national and international research needs, and will inform and impact on policy and industry in the UK, Europe and further afield. During the Catalyst Grant, we will conduct a programme of 'Research Strategy Development' workshops, involving participants from the four Universities, and, additionally, a number of key project partners from the water and waste industries, and from Government and the Environment Agency. The programme of activities during the Catalyst Grant will enable us to identify key areas for targeted and hypotheses-driven interdisciplinary research, and define the specific objectives for the full Research Programme.