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"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 (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.

“Sometimes these ideas can get momentum in academic circles and there is a lot of talk but I come from a background that says let’s make an impact.

“It was part of my engineering training and part of my experiences growing up in that environment.

“I had a short spell in industry with Yorkshire Water after which I finished my PhD in geotechnical engineering at Loughborough University in the early 1990s.

“But it was the height of the recession and I ended up in higher education by default!

“It wasn’t where I had originally been heading but I enjoyed it and have stayed ever since. I started my career at Loughborough University because, at the time, it was much more industry facing than most.

“I got my inspiration from my father. He worked for Lucas and used to engage with academics and was often bemoaning that they were occasionally doing research for research’s sake! It was embedded in me.

“So, I was always very conscious of that and, therefore, I’ve always maintained that we have to produce something that is useful.

“Academia and business work so much better together nowadays. It’s partly top-down but it’s also bottom-up. In the 1980s, academia was much more about the prestige of academic activity.

“The drive from funding bodies, the interest from industry to engage and the general drive of the country as a whole have all been catalysts to draw businesses and universities together.”

He added: “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 was a mantra I grew up with. My grandparents had come through the Second World War and it was instilled in me from an early age.

“So, I’ve always been asking the question: is there a better way of doing this?”

The ARLI project is helping businesses to come up with that better way by offering support to reduce raw materials usage, including material substitution and waste reduction; reuse of waste streams; applications including geotechnical engineering associated with buried infrastructure; infrastructure monitoring and assessment; erosion detection and monitoring; design for disassembly and sustainability in the supply chain.

And Professor Jefferson is keen to stress the practicality of the work.

He said: “There are many companies that we have supported. They are from across a range of sectors including food and beverage through to tyre manufacturers. For example, bicycle tyres have often been sent to landfill so we’ve looked at what we might be able to do with that.

“We’ve worked with certain industries to look at the way they package products. We’ve also looked at producing edible spoons too!

“We will talk to anybody and part of that initial conversation will be to see how we can support them but also a key message is that we work with a number of partner organisations and other parts of the university.

“We are aiming to support a number of companies within the LEP region. Some of our targets are around business assists, some are around new products to market and, also, employment opportunities.

“However, we see this as a chance to offer longer term support and develop partnerships.”

He believes Covid-19 and the economic fall-out has seen companies looking to broaden their horizons and targeting net zero and sustainability is part of that.

“The pandemic has been an interesting catalyst for businesses starting to think about net zero and carbon reduction,” he said.

“There have been businesses that have struggled and, ultimately, may fade away and then there have been others that have embraced this as an opportunity and have brought in new products and new services.

“We’ve had a lot of success in this field – more than we anticipated prepandemic and that has been one of the strange things. Businesses have been more open to conversations because they are, undoubtedly, looking for new opportunities.

“We’re here to help and provide that support to help your business to look at alternatives that will help you to reduce your carbon footprint either through process management or alternative products.

“The take home message is that we have been successful in helping a number of SMEs actually change and benefit from this and we want to help more businesses too by building real partnerships.”