Pre-announcement: Sustainable Industrial Futures

https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/sustainable-industrial-futures/

This is a £21million (funded by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) at 80% FEC over seven years) flagship investment focused on tackling cross-sectoral research challenges rooted in excellent, leading-edge engineering and physical sciences and transdisciplinary approaches to enable the transition of UK industrial processes and operations to net zero.

Major progress is required to make significant advances in industrial emissions in the UK and EPSRC aims to drive a sustainable industrial future, shifting the UK away from environmentally detrimental industries and processes to more sustainable and circular alternatives.

the UK as identified by the Climate Change Committee (CCC). Through this funding opportunity, we aim to drive a sustainable industrial future, shifting the UK away from environmentally detrimental industries and processes to more sustainable and circular alternatives.

This funding opportunity will focus on an existing critical mass of research to deliver a cross-sectoral systems approach, working closely with industry and policy-makers to scale up, drive impact and translation and ensure the entire system delivers.

The objectives of this funding opportunity are to:

• support one virtual centre of excellence that enables high-greenhouse gas (GHG) emitting UK incumbent industries to shift towards sustainable operations with net zero/negative GHG emissions, enabling thriving biodiversity, economic and societal resilience, employment growth and resource & energy security
• advance the UK’s transition to net zero by building on previous UKRI investments (such as the Industrial Decarbonisation Challenge and Transforming Foundation Industries Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund programmes, as well as programmes such as National Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Research (NICER) Programme​)
• deliver excellent, leading-edge engineering and physical sciences and transdisciplinary research

A key aspect required of the Centre is true co-creation with industry from the outset, where stakeholders collaborate around emerging opportunities and quick wins in order to meet the needs of industry now as well as in the future. To ensure that research outcomes can be exploited by industry, we are looking for clear evidence of genuine, substantive partnerships, with co-creation and co-delivery of projects and activities. As well as this expectation for co-creation from the outset, the Centre should welcome new and additional industry engagement at any time throughout the lifetime of the investment and have a clear strategy and framework to support this.

The investment should explore ‘learning by doing’ as far as possible by collaborating with industry to see what works and partnering with demonstration and deployment programmes as far as possible.