The UK, Ireland, Canada and France have all declared climate emergencies. Climate change has never had a more prominent in the public eye. With legal commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050 relative to 1990 levels, it has never been more important to do everything we can to reduce energy demand. The promise in this project is to help provide new methods for analysing the 'data deluge' of energy and building system data (from IoT devices) that can help unlock energy efficiencies and identify the benefits of energy efficiency measures despite noisy and heterogeneous data; and make it cheap, repeatable and routine to do this on an ongoing basis. Key to our approach are novel statistical and mixed-method techniques working closely with our project partners and their data to demonstrate the feasibility of these benefits. Our ultimate goal is to make it possible to translate the savings found in one context to another (e.g. another similar building, or even similar business). This would enable the 'digital replication' of energy efficiency savings, and even an almost viral spread of the knowledge and technique across sectors---with massive potential. Currently for many organisations, making sense of this rich source of information defies the human resource available to analyse and profit from the potential insights available. Such analysis is currently the domain of specialist consultancy providers due to the significant cost, time and know-how required to identify opportunities in the data. This restricts the penetration of data-driven monitoring and energy reduction strategies, and the opportunities for knowledge transfer across different locations and businesses. This project will clear this analysis bottleneck. The approach builds on foundations in modern data science, applying cutting edge techniques to automatically identify problems at particular sites and recommend interventions based on cross-site comparisons. The principle objective is to enable commercial sites to reduce their energy demand and keep it low without requiring energy analysts to manually investigate each site individually, at further expense. Core to our approach are next-generation statistics and machine learning methods applied to a unique corpus of fine-grained energy and process data sourced from our partners (BT, Tesco, Lancaster University Facilities (a town sized campus), and energy management consultancy and cloud energy analytics provider, BEST). This will enable us to apply cutting edge statistical techniques to a very significant data set in this domain for the first time. More specifically, our main aims are to: 1. develop automated techniques for supporting analysis, identifying and recommending energy savings strategies, based on the application of statistical and machine learning techniques to fine-grained energy data; 2. derive knowledge of how, where and when energy is used, to identify opportunities to reduce and shift demand by comparing differences in energy use over time within and between premises; 3. support regular and repeated analysis, towards a continual improvement in energy reduction over time. 4. provide open source, permissively licensed implementations for enabling uptake, even beyound our project partners and their partner networks. Our publication and publicity strategies will maximise exposure of our project results to various stakeholder groups including academia, practitioners, and key industry stakeholders.

In the UK retail outlets are the biggest emitters of CO2 within the commercial property sector. Many retail business are striving to reduce their carbon footprints, with many having ambitious targets for carbon neutrality over the next few years. This feasibility study aims to identify new ways to dramtically reduce end use energy demand within the retail sector. The novelty of the proposed work lies both in its scope and the technologies that it will develop. Rather than attributing energy use and human comfort directly to spatial design, building services, energy controls, company energy policy or human behaviour, this research will explore the intersection of all of these influences within a 'mixed reality' retail environment. This would take the form of an interactive 'gaming' model as a portable 'box' with a tangible user interface deployed in store. It would allow users to 'visualise' energy use and its consequences as part of a broader energy engagement strategy. The box would comprise a scale model of a physical store layout and a set of coded intervention cards that would allow participants to interact with the physical model on the table as well as in the virtual model - the blend between physical and virtual interactions establishes a mixed reality design platform (MRDP). Real time data from existing store sensors can feed directly into the virtual model to inform and respond to scenario testing as users interact with the model. Store staff and customers would be able to engage with the model proactively or passively via a mix of physical, virtual and display modules. This serious gaming environment will provide a stimulating and interactive way of sharing ideas and co-creating new solutions. Most importantly, the MRDP transforms what is normally an intangible numerical database (numbers collected by performance sensors) into an interactive and immersive experience to allow for continual testing and refinement with the opportunity of users co-creating novel approaches to reducing energy use while maintaining a positive shopping experience. The learning that accrues through this serious gaming activity would inform future strategies for reducing energy demand whilst simultaneously attending to other performance criteria (e.g. internal air quality, thermal comfort and the customer experience). The mobility and placement of the MRDP allows the retail floor or back of house area to become a platform for learning and drives a more open relationship with stakeholders. Our principal research partner is Tesco PLC, the UK's largest retailer with revenue of over £55 Billion. Tesco have an ambitious commitment to become a zero carbon business by 2050, and as part of this they aim to reduce carbon emissions in store by 50% over the next 4 years. This research would support their objectives by developing an exciting method of accelerating their progress towards their corporate goal and will help position the organisation at the vanguard of current technology and thinking in the energy demand reduction space.

As individuals, our daily routines rely on plastics in their many shapes and forms, whether as long lasting components of our homes and vehicles or as essential elements of important advances in medicine, water purification and infrastructure, or as packaging for cosmetics, food, drink, toiletries, cleaning products and healthcare products. These plastics are unrivalled materials: they are inexpensively synthesised, lightweight, recyclable and often deliver unmatchable performance. However, our love of plastics comes at a significant cost, as the environmental impact of these materials is massive, and growing. Genuinely sustainable plastics will need new forms of resource efficient materials, smart supply chains, and sustainable business practices, requiring holistic and integrated solutions. This proposal brings together diverse groups from across The University of Manchester to tackle this grand challenge of plastic waste. We seek solutions to the challenge of plastics pollution through an integrated approach that explicitly couples Manchester's strength in sociotechnological understanding and influence to our industry-guided solutions across chemistry, safety, materials, engineering and social sciences. The goal is to create a concerted, focussed consortium of diverse individuals who will lead stakeholder conversations, pitch multi-disciplinary projects that build from our strengths, and incubate these projects into translatable solutions. Through these collaborative efforts we will develop 6-12 projects building from our diverse expertise in urban recycling, sustainable business models, invisible plastic waste, valorising waste plastic streams, and new degradable polymers, and through them aim to: i) reduce the need for plastic by addressing demand, ii) improve the materials used to deliver better performance and clean degradation, iii) demonstrate new methods for recycling soft and mixed plastics/non-plastic films (currently very difficulty) and removal of micro plastics from source; and iv) create smart circular economies that allow users to take ownership of and reduce plastic waste. A multidisciplinary team of researchers at The University of Manchester will lead a portfolio of projects to tackle this grand challenge. Activities will be aligned with the first-of-its-kind Greater Manchester plan to drive down single-use plastics by 2020 and use the city-region as a living lab to innovate at speed and deploy solutions at scale.

The "Internet of Food Things" will create an interdisciplinary network that defragments and expands the UK's food digital economy. Food and drink is the largest manufacturing sector of the UK economy. The food supply chain from farm to consumer generates £108bn GVA per year and employs 3.9m people. In addition, food has highly significant social and environmental impacts. Obesity alone, including downstream health impacts such as diabetes, heart disease etc, costs the UK economy £49bn per annum. There are still c. 1,000,000 cases of food poisoning per year costing £1.5bn p.a.. Food generates up to 30% of the UK's road freight, but 10MT of food, generating 20MTCO2e of GHG emissions, are wasted each year. Digital technology has the potential to transform the food chain, for example, opportunities (that map onto the EPSRC DE Network strategy) include but are not limited to; - New business models via distributed ledger technology (DLT) to underpin the traceability of food. The recent Holmes report identified food as one of the key seven UK industry sectors most likely to benefit from DLTs. - The creation of a "data trust" for the food sector to underpin data sharing, trust and interoperability within complex supply chains. - Wide scale application of the internet of things (IoT) for the service community, for example, the use of IoT by domestic users (refrigerators, cooking devices etc) to improve health outcomes and reduce waste. - The development of new digital labelling protocols that assist with consumer use of food as well as supply chain optimisation, - The use of novel digital technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence) to reduce food waste by optimising whole supply chains from manufacturer to consumer. Hitherto these opportunities have not or are only partially realised. There is an urgent need to defragment the digitally inspired academic community and connect it to food industry practitioners. Although the digital focus is in within EPSRC's remit (IoT, blockchain, data trusts, interoperability issues), we will multiply impact by including interdisciplinary contributions from food science and technology practitioners, policy makers, engineers, management specialists and colleagues in social and behavioural sciences. The network will include academia, industry and consumer interests. The industry interest covers the whole food and digital innovation chain including food manufacturers (e.g. Food and Drink Federation, EPSRC Food CIM), IoT and digital specialists (Siemens and IMS Evolve), the HVM Catapult and regulators such as the Food Standards Agency and GS1 the international agency that sets data standards (bar codes) for retail. Consumers will be represented through out, but the inclusion of food retailers within the consortium provides access to unrivalled data sets demonstrating behaviours. The DE network will facilitate a number of key actions, including a marketing, social media and work shop / conference campaign that yields a large scale (up to 500 persons) network who have mutual interests within the food digital domain. We will host one main conference per year and in addition 3 facilitated workshops p.a. to deep dive key questions within the food domain. We will fund a range of pilot studies (£350K applied) and detailed reviews to underpin horizon scanning. All the research challenges will be co created with industry. We expect that the network will facilitate onward research funding and catalyse interest in the food digital economy. In addition to network activities, we will deliver a comprehensive pathway to impact that engages professional practitioners as well as the general public and schools.

Campylobacter spp. are extremely important food borne enteropathogenic bacteria, estimated to cause over 600,000 cases of infection in the UK each year with around 100 deaths. It is estimated that Campylobacter infections cost the UK economy around £1 billion per year. Infection is characterised by acute and sometimes bloody diarrhoea, particularly in children. The last few years have seen a marked rise in cases in compromised elderly populations and in such people, particularly those with bowel cancer, infection can be fatal. Chicken meat is the most important source and vehicle for human Campylobacter infections and around 80% of chickens on sale in the UK are Campylobacter-positive. Campylobacter are natural inhabitants of the intestinal tract of chickens and other food animals. Contamination of chicken meat takes two forms. Carcass surfaces can carry high levels of Campylobacter and this can lead to cross-contamination in both domestic and commercial catering. This is an important risk factor for infection. However, and perhaps more importantly, Campylobacter have been recovered from deep muscle tissues of up to 27% of chickens tested. Furthermore, liver tissues are also commonly contaminated. In these tissues the bacteria will be better protected from the effects of cooking. Undercooked chicken meat and chicken liver pate are internationally important vehicles of Campylobacter infection. To improve public health in the UK it is essential that the number of contaminated chickens on sale is reduced. The proposed research will examine the different systems in which UK chickens are grown to identify cost-effective farm-based control options. Our work will focus on chickens reared intensively in housed systems as these comprise ~90% of the UK market. The work will be in collaboration with the three biggest poultry producers in the UK and all the major UK food retailers are giving financial support. The proposed research builds on past studies which showed that chickens (broilers) reared under higher welfare systems are less likely to have Campylobacter than birds reared more intensively. The higher welfare systems generally use slower-growing birds and stock houses with fewer birds than the more intensive systems. Our work showed that birds reared in the more intensive system had poorer welfare, as shown by high rates of endemic disease and general health and leg problems. This might explain why these birds were more likely to be Campylobacter-positive, as birds compromised by poor health and/or welfare are more susceptible to these bacteria. These differences might be due to the birds used and/or the in-house environment and we will determine this. Our field work might also indicate that the slower-growing bird types may be inherently more Campylobacter-resistant. We will conduct longitudinal studies on flocks reared under different systems and determine when birds first become Campylobacter-positive and relate this to changes in bird health and welfare. We will also determine whether the spread of Campylobacter from the intestine of the birds to edible tissues like liver occurs on farm and if it is linked to poor welfare for endemic disease. Our aim is to provide the UK poultry industry with science-based and cost-effective control options, which will help it meet customer demands and comply with forth-coming EU legislation aimed at reducing the number of chickens that are Campylobacter-positive.