Applied research partnership helps to create sustainable global future

In the global pursuit of a sustainable future, green energy, and renewable resources are essential. They promise cleaner air, reduced carbon emissions, and arresting climate change. The principles of the circular economy, at the same time, need to ensure that the resource we have are used optimally. In both approaches, energy, and circular economy, must be integrated.

Too often the resources we have consumed have found their way to landfill, offshoring or incineration. However, they are a precious resource which can produce fuels, energy, and raw materials which can be put back into product manufacturing. As advanced global economies reshape their energy systems, there is a need for an integration with waste processing.

The Birmingham Energy Institute has leading programmes in the areas of rare-earth magnet and lithium-ion battery recycling, as well as plastics reprocessing. The Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT has developed thermochemical processes, like Thermo Catalytic Reforming and iCycle, which allow reprocessing of biogenic residues and hard to recycle waste streams, e.g. electronic scrap or fibre reinforced plastics into useful feedstocks for the chemical and petrochemical industry.

Boosting resource efficiency will play a key role in achieving our sustainable energy goals and, as the University of Birmingham joins Fraunhofer UMSICHT in renewing our partnership, we are looking forward to working together on developing further scalable technology that will enhance the circular economy and boost the production of energy from waste.

Pooling our skills and experience allows us to develop processes that utilise waste and other non-fossil alternative carbon sources – helping us reduce our environmental footprint by conserving raw materials, cutting down on pollution, and reducing the amount of waste we produce.

Our partnership is well placed to contribute to a more effective circular economy. The University of Birmingham is one of the world’s top 100 universities in the world; Fraunhofer UMSICHT is part of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft based in Germany, the world's leading organization for applied research. We have had a collaborative partnership since 2017 - combining academic expertise with the skills to translate cutting-edge research into industrial technology that delivers new approaches to energy and waste management.

We are now renewing our partnership addressing the practical challenges of broadening our collaboration around the circular economy, after signing a four-year extension to our original 2017 partnership agreement.

We have covered a lot of ground since 2017, producing 28 co-authored papers – largely in energy, environmental science, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Engineering, and Agricultural and Biological Sciences. Our To-Syn-Fuel and FlexJet projects on biofuels from residual and waste materials are two joint research projects successfully supported by the HORIZON 2020 programme.

Our scope has grown from its original focus on energy and waste management and we are looking towards a future that involves collaboration around carbon capture and utilisation, renewable energy, heat storage, hydrogen production and utilisation, critical elements and materials, and polymers recycling/chemical recycling.

We are proud of the great work achieved by our partnership. As we globally consume ever-increasing amounts of energy, collaborative research that helps to deliver green and sustainable energy becomes ever-more important. Combining the University of Birmingham’s flair for research innovation with Fraunhofer UMSICHT’s applied research expertise will help to change people’s lives for the better.

Renewable energies and the transformation to sustainable, emission-free raw materials - especially carbon - represent the challenges facing the industry today. Fraunhofer UMSICHT’s application-orientated research in the fields of carbon conversion, recycling, biofuels and CCU / CCUS dovetail perfectly with cutting-edge research at Birmingham to meet these demands.

We can already see the practical outcome of our partnership at Tyseley Energy Park, in Birmingham, where the University of Birmingham is active as a development partner. A research plant, based on Fraunhofer UMSICHT technology, converts biogenic residues into liquid energy carriers and chemicals.

There are also synergies which support our partnership. The University of Birmingham’s research links to Germany are strong and since 2018, the University has also had a partnership with Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM) - a senior scientific and technical federal institute with responsibility to the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy in Germany. The University and BAM share wide-ranging research interests relating to Energy, Additive Manufacturing, Chemistry and Materials, Life and Environmental Sciences, and Engineering.

Our partnership is now entering a new and exciting phase, broadening the scope of our collaboration. The road ahead may be challenging, but together we are confident that we can work with industrial partners in Germany and the UK to unlock solutions that will help us overcome the barriers to creating a sustainable future.