The UK Government’s ambitions for a net-zero carbon agenda face roadblocks as innovation gaps continue to grow. However the Innovation Centre for Applied Sustainable Technologies (iCAST) might be the answer
In 2020, the UK Government set an ambitious target to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and create up to 250,000 green jobs in the process. However, as highlighted by the 2023 Skidmore Review, there remains an innovation gap that needs to be filled for these green goals to be met.
The Innovation Centre for Applied Sustainable Technologies (iCAST) was established in 2021 to help fill this gap as a R&D and collaboration hub for companies working on clean growth technologies. It focuses on translating sustainable chemical technologies research into commercial applications to tackle the global challenges of climate emergency, sustainable development and plastics pollution.
“This is truly an exciting collaboration and couldn’t come at a more crucial time,” says Paddy Bradley, CEO of Swindon and Wiltshire Local Enterprise Partnership. “iCAST is a significant step forward in reaching the goal of not only changing the ways the world thinks, but also how we behave to prevent further damage to our natural environment. “We need business, academia and technology to harmonise as we advance towards a genuinely circular economy and iCAST is a partnership opportunity allowing us to meet today’s challenges.”
Green innovation through iCAST
The £17 million facility with a hub at the Carriage Works in Swindon is backed by the Research England Development Fund, an initiative from UKRI that drives innovation in research and knowledge exchange in higher education.
iCAST brings together industry with expertise at the Universities of Bath and Oxford, the High Value Manufacturing Catapult’s Sustainability Partnership (National Composites Centre and Centre for Process Innovation), innovation experts at SETsquared, Local Enterprise Partnerships, Swindon Borough Council and investors.
Its core job is to provide agile and flexible support for businesses to scale up new sustainable technologies and bring them to market. Critically, it delivers proof-of-principle, scale-up and feasibility studies to accelerate how soon cutting-edge sustainable concepts will mature so that focus can be placed on those with the largest potential impacts.
Bridging the innovation gap
The UK is one of the world’s top producers of chemicals and pharmaceuticals, which contribute £17.8 billion in GVA to the economy each year. The sector also directly employs more than 140,000 highly skilled people and supports the jobs of around 500,000 more, as well as investing in world-class research in the sector.
However, until now, industry and research have been disconnected. As Professor Matthew Davidson, Director of iCAST and Whorrod Professor of Sustainable Chemical Technologies at the University of Bath, explains: “There is currently a translation gap between publicly funded investment into fundamental research and its deployment by UK companies. iCAST is going some way towards address this gap by enabling companies to easily invest in R&D in a collaborative and agile environment and by providing specialist business support for innovations to be deployed commercially.
“By partnering companies with the critical mass of research expertise at Bath and at Oxford, iCAST will accelerate scale-up of new technologies, deliver economic impact, and build supply chains, jobs and growth in the UK.”
Delivering on Net-Zero carbon
Work to establish iCAST is now well underway, and it is now open for business as a ‘one-stop shop’ for delivering net-zero carbon emissions with the resources, facilities and know-how to accelerate the UK’s transition from a linear model to a circular economy. It will deliver this in a three-step process to accelerate innovation from proof of principle towards market readiness.
First, it will leverage existing public investment in research at Bath, Oxford and the HVM Catapult in areas identified as having the greatest potential. Researchers and businesses can then be assisted in discovering and prioritising the highest value innovations. And finally, iCAST resources are being deployed in joint industry projects to develop and accelerate the best new commercial products, services and processes. Access to investment and business expertise via SETsquared further enhances commercial readiness levels.
iCAST’s focus is on research and innovation in four core programmes: bio-based feedstocks, sustainable manufacturing, sustainable engineering materials and circular plastics. Close collaboration with innovation start-ups targeting these new technologies means that even if some technologies do not make the final cut, expertise and teams can be easily redeployed to work on other projects with a shared mission.
A strategic location for iCAST
While the research home of iCAST will be at the Universities of Bath and Oxford, its innovation space will soon be located in Swindon’s iconic Carriage Works. This offcampus location provides a dedicated place where iCAST’s partners can work together on the Centre’s mission. Swindon itself provides national and international connectivity for iCAST businesses in the heart of the region’s Western Gateway Powerhouse innovation system, as well as close proximity to the lab facilities in Bath and Oxford.
The partnership already has more than 90 member companies ranging from spinouts, high growth SMEs and multinational corporates including Unilever, Wessex Water, Total Energies Corbion and Naturbeads.
Reducing lab waste
Amongst the new members of iCAST is LabCycle, a spin-out company from Bath that recycles single-use plastic waste from scientific laboratories and non-infectious waste from the healthcare sector, to keep these high-value materials in the system and create a circular economy.
iCAST has worked with LabCycle to demonstrate their technology and significantly strengthen their relationship with prospective commercial partners. This has already helped the company secure public and private funds of around £500K, putting LabCycle on a firm path to future success and growth.
Unlocking hemp fibre processing for sustainable fashion
Located in the South West, Gaiatech is a startup that holds land under Home Office licence to cultivate industrial hemp. The company was looking to improve the processing of hemp fibres into textile-grade fibres appropriate for use in the UK and global textiles and fashion markets. Gaiatech and iCAST worked together to develop proof-of-concept research to identify the best approach to process hemp fibres, and then they focused on establishing and evaluating a method that would allow scaling industrial production of cottonised hemp fibres.
Developing renewable, bio-sourced platform chemicals
An early joiner company of iCAST’s membership, Bio-Sep specialises in the conversion of non-food, lignocellulosic biomass generated by agriculture and forestry into high-value biochemicals, using its unique, low energy biorefinery process. Their new product and exclusive separation process have great potential for the largescale manufacture of sustainable biochemical substitutes that can be used in multiple commercial applications, such as the composites and construction industries.
Their interdisciplinary R&D project with iCAST allowed the company to extensively test the properties and performance of the products, both as part of biobased composites and as a cement admixture, thanks to the extensive pool of expertise and knowledge available through iCAST.