Profile: Professor Ian Jefferson
"We all get climate change, we read about it all the time. But when you see waste because people aren’t thinking carefully enough, it makes you think. When I was on construction sites, I could see that budgets were tight and yet waste was costing money and this was not sustainable."
Waste not, want not to achieve net zero Achieving net zero and sustainability may be the official aims of Professor Ian Jefferson as his team seeks to support businesses across the region, but it’s good old-fashioned values of ‘waste not, want not’ that are his real driving force. Ian Jefferson is Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Birmingham, where he is also Deputy Head of the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences and Deputy Director – geo-structures of the UKCRIC National Buried Infrastructure Facility. He is also the principal and co-investigator on a number of projects including the Alternative Raw Materials with Low Impact (ARLI) examining how waste can be turned into marketable products. The ERDF project offers advice and technical support to eligible small and medium sized enterprises
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(SMEs) across three Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) areas - Greater Birmingham & Solihull, Black Country and Coventry and Warwickshire – on developing innovative low-carbon products and processes. “ARLI was borne out of the agenda to look at low carbon and net zero – before net zero was actually a phrase,” he said. “The project has been around for nearly four years now and we are now into phase two. We are working with businesses in Coventry and Warwickshire in this phase.
“It’s aiming to support small and medium sized enterprises in the Local Enterprise Partnership region to help them fulfil that goal. It is providing R&D support and knowledge exchange to look at processes or products and potentially to get new products to market. “There are a range of different companies we’ve worked with where we’ve taken a waste stream, brought it into a different industry and then it’s become a new product from the waste. It’s part of that circular economy. “If we can use waste as a resource, it gives us a much better chance of achieving net zero.” Professor Jefferson grew up in the South East and told teachers he wanted to be a farmer when he was quizzed at infant school. He later opted for engineering – a career that ran in the family – and briefly worked for Yorkshire Water on construction sites after which he
completed his PhD at Loughborough University. It’s clear that those family values remain a guiding force for him. “My background is in civil engineering and, particularly, dealing with the ground so foundations and that kind of thing,” he said. “I joined the University of Birmingham in the early noughties when sustainability had started to become topical. Having seen the waste on sites, this was an opportunity to make and affect change. “We were starting to look at opportunities to work with business and it really sparked us into thinking that we could make a tangible difference. “Businesses need to stay marketable and profitable – because it is about the bottom line – but we could take some of these broader principles around environment and social awareness but make it genuinely sustainable from a business point of view. www.cw-chamber.co.uk
