Creating sustainable materials for a circular economy

Achieving a circular economy

As highlighted in recent summers, extreme weather events are becoming a ‘new normal’ due to climate change. While more than one-third (34%) of the world’s largest companies are now committed to net zero, nearly all (93%) will fail to achieve their goals if they don’t at least double the pace of emissions reduction by 2030. We are continuing to release carbon emissions into the atmosphere, extracting finite resources at an increasing pace, and polluting the environment with plastics, clothes, and waste chemicals.

In order to mitigate the causes and effects of climate change and environmental pollution, materials and infrastructure play a key role. By emphasizing resource efficiency and reducing waste, transitioning to a circular economy presents a potent strategy. Through our next Global Challenge campaign, we will be seeking novel research and assets in sustainable materials that will accelerate the transition towards a circular economy.

We know from the Covid-19 pandemic that solutions to the challenges we face globally often come from academia. But without a clear pathway from academia into industry, new breakthroughs can rarely make it to market. In order to ensure research can be applied and translated into solving issues such as material sustainability, industry needs a channel to communicate its requirements and priorities.

So, what does industry need from academia in order to achieve their net zero targets? As we know from our previous Global Challenge campaign on plastic sustainability and from activity on our online partnering platform, there remain technical challenges across the life cycles of materials and resources that still require new innovation.

Key challenges

In order to achieve net zero, there are key technical sustainability challenges the research ecosystem needs to overcome. Achieving a circular economy requires every step of the value chain to pull its weight and work collaboratively. We know that the R&D costs associated with creating sustainable materials and recycling and reusing them are high and generally companies cannot do it alone, as a challenge on this scale requires collaboration between sectors and across the different steps of the value chain, requiring vast amounts of technical knowledge and innovation.

These challenges are not limited to academia: start-ups operating in the circular economy space report facing more challenges than other new ventures, as the ecosystem is very complex with fewer clear routes to success. And the challenges are not limited to plastics. For example, in the construction industry, the manufacture of cement is highly polluting and produced in such abundance that it accounts for 8% of the annual carbon emissions around the world and uses around 10% of global drinking water. But academia and industry working collaboratively on solutions, such as adding non-harmful, extremophile bacteria to cement mixes to create ‘self-healing’ concrete that also can withstand extreme weather events, can help us create a more resilient, environmentally friendly infrastructure that looks forward to a more sustainable future.

Help address these challenges

For this campaign, we will be building on the successes of our plastics campaign, widening the scope to explore the whole field of sustainable materials with applications that are comprehensively cross-sector. We will be looking at how technological innovation can be uncovered from across disciplines and applications to progress towards a circular economy in a truly collaborative and sustainable way.