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Upcoming Opportunities for Researchers
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Upcoming Opportunities for Students
The ICEC-MCM has a large programme for PhD studentships across different universities and expect to recruit a cohort that will commence their doctoral studies in 3Q 2024. The PhD studentships apply to UK home students however, students not eligible for UK fee status can apply but will have to arrange funding for the difference between the UK (home) rate and the overseas rate themselves. If you are interested to take on a new challenge in the area of circular economy and mineral based construction materials, please do get in touch.
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ICEC-MCM Doctoral Research Topics
- Identification of materials recovery potential through pre-demolition audits
Contact Information
The Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources, UCL
Primary Supervisor: Teresa Domenech
Email: t.domenech@ucl.ac.ukCo-Supervisor: TBC, St. Gobain
To apply send your CV and cover letter to icec-mcm@ucl.ac.uk.
Background
Construction and demolition waste (CDW) is the largest fraction of all waste generated in the UK. In 2020, CDW accounted for around 59 million tonnes. C&D waste contains an array of different materials including metals, concrete, bricks, glass, wood, plaster board, plastics and other fractions. While the recovery rates of CDW in the UK are very high, with 92.6% reported in 2020, and the value of some of these resources is potentially high, current models and practices of demolition mean that the value is marginal and recovery of materials, while high, is not aligned with CE principle of keeping material at their highest value.
The current waste regulation specifies the preparing for re-use, recycling and other material recovery of non-hazardous construction and demolition shall be increased to a minimum of 70 % by weight, which is already widely achieved in construction and demolition projects, but the next step is to move towards achieving high quality recycling of those materials, so that they can substitute primary materials and help construction material organisations achieve higher fractions of recycled content, which is increasingly being specified by clients.
To be able to extract and convert demolition waste into resources, a whole life cycle perspective needs to be considered, ensuring buildings and infrastructures are seen as material banks. This requires changes along the design phase, construction/ installation and ensuring full traceability of materials through material passports integrated into BIM models. It also requires understanding of the processes required to perform modular demolition, clean up of key materials and business models that ensure recovered materials are of sufficient quality, and thus value, to be used as secondary materials. The project will focus on plasterboard to explore avenues of recovery from waste so that it can be recycled back into new products.
Aims & Objectives
The specific scope of the PhD project will be defined in collaboration with the industrial sponsor to ensure that the project is relevant and aligns with the organisations main priority areas:
- Define procedures for pre-demolition audits that help to identify key value materials and define strategies for segregated recovery
- Characterise the nature of recovered materials, levels of cross contamination and identify processes for cleaning-up and homogenising secondary material
- Identify potential business opportunities and costs of selected demolition and recovery
- Reverse logistics systems to ensure recovered material finds its way to manufacturers
- Identify design and installation procedures that enable recovery of materials at the end of life
- Explore the role of material passports to enhance traceability of materials in buildings and help to assess recovery potential
- Understanding the socioeconomic implications of resource emergencies and associated mitigation policies using Bayesian material flow analysis
Contact Information
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College
Primary Supervisor: Rupert Myers
Email: r.myers@imperial.ac.ukTo apply send your CV and cover letter to icec-mcm@ucl.ac.uk.
Co-Supervisor(s):
Pablo Brito-Parada, Department of Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College, Email: p.brito-parada@imperial.ac.uk
Yves Plancherel, Department of Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College, Email: y.plancherel@imperial.ac.uk
Dr. Kolyan Ray, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College, Email: kolyan.ray@imperial.ac.uk
Background
Demand for materials and energy are increasing. Decarbonisation ambitions such as the Paris Agreement imply a radical longer-term shift from fossil materials utilisation (e.g. fuels for energy, feedstock for chemicals) to minerals (e.g. metals for renewable energy technologies) and biomass (e.g. bio-derived chemicals). Shorter-term shifts in resource flows can also have huge socioeconomic implications, such as the UK ‘energy crisis’ (2022). However, the socioeconomic impacts of these issues, which often arise from significant supply-demand mismatches, remain poorly understood. Hence, there is a growing and urgent need to systemically quantify and analyse how resources are used in the economy, to discover sustainable production-usage patterns that avoid supply-demand mismatches in the shorter and longer terms. This information then needs to be disseminated to policymakers, industry, and the resource community, so the necessary systemic actions can be taken to mitigate undesirable impacts.
Previous research by Myers and colleagues on this topic, funded by the UKRI Circular Economy Centre in Mineral-Based Construction Materials [1], the Office for National Statistics, and as part of the Imperial-X Resources Observatory (RO) [2], has developed the Bayesian material flow analysis methodology needed for a quantitative digital twin of the physical economy [3]. This research involves comprehensive mapping of resource stocks and flows from extraction through to end-of-life, and then application of this systemic quantitative evidence to inform policymaking and business strategy.
The vision for its application is to focus on resource emergencies and black swan events (UK energy crisis, semiconductor chip shortage, trade partner import/export bans such as the Rare Earth Crisis [4], etc.), to better understand these and to both propose mitigating policies and understand their efficacy – much like COVID-19 epidemiological modelling in SAGES [5], which showed effects of individual measures like social distancing on COVID-19 infections/mortality and demand for health services [6]. This approach was initially demonstrated by its application to understand the supply/demand balance of construction aggregates in England until 2030. We are now seeking to enhance its capability by applying it to other material systems and important current resource issues.
This PhD project will focus on improving the capability of Bayesian material flow analysis methodology to include multi-regional systems and energy stocks and flows (by incorporating energy balances). This will include application of statistics and scientific programming in our existing Python code. The improved methodology and code will be applied to analyse the supply/demand balance of energy materials in UK and its major trading partners. We plan to focus on the current ‘energy crisis’ and understand the landscape of energy material supply scenarios available to the UK and how these marry up to its demand. This will include the major energy production sites (and their processing steps) that supply (refined) energy materials to the UK.
Aims & Objectives
- Development of datasets describing the material and energy compositions of products and production/waste treatment/recycling process inputs and outputs
- Improvement of our Python code (on our Imperial-hosted github repository) so it can ingest both material and energy data, and splice its outputs by region (e.g. UK), material or energy cycle, and product (or product category, e.g. electricity generation).
- We expect that these advancements will be demonstrated by modelling different competing technology options within the same product category, e.g. different energy sources for electricity generation, to understand their resource implications. Dissemination of these research outcomes to key stakeholders such as policymakers will also be key.