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).
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