Public Funding for Morgan Sindall Construction & Infrastructure Ltd

Around 25% of UK carbon emissions are linked to the built environment. Building materials are a significant contribution to this strain on the planet: steel and cement alone account for around 15% of global carbon emissions. This can be understood in terms of embodied carbon, which means the intensive carbon footprint resulting from material manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance, and disposal during the construction process. Governments around the world are now requiring Whole Life Carbon Assessments (WLCAs) as a way of reducing the environmental burden of construction. WLCAs involve calculating a building's carbon emissions across its entire lifecycle, offering valuable insights into reducing its environmental impact. In the UK, professional bodies are now requiring new recruits in the built environment to understand WLCAs, but the universities generally lack the teaching experience and expertise in this area to meet this need. ICCE will leverage Education Technology (EdTech) to address this whole life carbon skills shortage and address the demand for sustainability skills in the construction industry. Through a series of cutting-edge design workshops, the project team will identify what students need from a successful EdTech tool in this area. This project lays the groundwork for a whole life carbon innovation to rapidly enter the UK EdTech market (~£3.7 billion). The resultant tool promises to accelerate understanding and take up of whole life carbon approaches among the next generation of construction professionals, stimulating demand for a lower carbon built environment across the supply chain.

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The Office of National Statistics estimates that the UK's construction sector accounts for 6.1% of GDP. Cement and concrete production are significant contributors to most construction processes, thereby making it very crucial for job creation. The cement subsector uniquely cuts across the manufacturing and £18bn-GDP Mineral Products sector that directly employs 74,000 people in addition to 3.5m indirect jobs. As valuable as the impact of this sector is to national and global development, its impact on energy consumption (60-70% of cement production cost is expended on energy) and greenhouse gas emissions is immense. For instance, the emission from the UK's construction industry was 13 million metric tonnes in 2019 and has continuously increased since 1990\. Similarly, greenhouse gas emissions attributable to UK's cement manufacturing activities have steadily risen from 3.2 million metric tonnes in 2007 to 4.4 million metric tonnes in 2019\. With the current global push for more stringent legislations on energy efficiency, the profitability as well as sustainability of foundation industries, such as cement would significantly depend on how much they lower their energy consumption and carbon footprints. While several initiatives including carbon capturing technologies are currently explored within the cement industry, questions related to technical complexity and cost implications still linger. Therefore, the current project will explore the application of graphene within the construction sector and its associated supply chain (especially cement manufacturing), to improve energy efficiency, raw material optimisation and the overall performance of cement/concrete. Preliminary investigations have already depicted the ability of graphene to significantly enhance concrete strength, but such studies mainly focused on the user end (e.g., construction sites) and less on the cement manufacturing process. Owing to the minute quantity of graphene required per weight, the issues surrounding the injection and dispersion of graphene within large quantities of cement have also not been investigated. Therefore, we will aim to develop a novel "high performance Graphene Enhanced cement" (GR-CEM) product. The GR-CEM will offer the opportunity to use lower grades of cement manufacturing raw materials (e.g., under burnt/low temperature clinker, raw limestone, etc.) and therefore contributing to mitigating the carbon impacts from cement manufacturing. The project will thus take into account the development of an optimised graphene dispersion and injection system, the economic viability of GR-CEM as well as its carbon and health and safety impact.