Prof Mark Jolly - Material Requirements 

So on on Friday, we started off with the question: “What material requirements are there currently in the different transport systems?” 

We seemed to get sidetracked into automotive, but eventually we moved across into other sectors, but I suspect that we haven't covered everything that we should have (eg. boats, planes, trucks and trains)

Essentially, if you look at the outputs, we have a lot of different metals. We have aluminium, a lot in aircraft and in boats and a smaller amount in Automotive; A lot of steel in Automotive and then we have nickel-based superalloys for things like aero engines; A lot of composites, mainly in the aircraft sector.

And then we have other areas such as rare earths and copper for electric vehicles and we will see fly by wire aircraft, fly by wire stuff, and then continuous supplies of things like lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese for high density batteries.

I would suggest that we didn't look at and cover very well some of the non-metallics that might exist in in transport systems. That might be something we should probably address today.

We then looked at some barriers and some things that would help us move towards our vision for 2050.

What we found difficult was actually finding what potentially would be the requirements for 2050, looking forward. So we think that we've got the same sort of materials in 2050, but perhaps more of the stuff that might go into electric vehicles. 

We felt that there needed to be a balanced agenda. We also looked at the fact that we need to do something on LCA and reduced carbon . Whatever we do, we need to have reduced carbon, so maybe transport modes would also need to change as well.

In the end, we identified some things that might slow the progress and we eventually got to defining 6 Challenges:
1) Lack of legislation is a blocker in industry, which would not help solve the circular economy.  

2) LCA is not implemented in the design phase.  

3) Clean energy needs to be used for extraction and manufacturing. 

4) Standards that prohibit progression. 

5) Effective recycling. 

6) Materials passporting. 

Dr Evi Petavratzi - Role of CE 

We looked at the role of circular economy to satisfy material requirements up to 2050 and we started by trying to put it with future vision of what transport system would look like and what sort of material requirements they would have. So there was a lot of discussion. I think that a lot of the people in the in my table agreed that we would like transport systems with minimum impact to the environment across the whole supply chain and would like to use more low carbon sustainable materials. We would like to have everything recycled at the end of life and use more biodegradable components.

We would like to have much better standardisation, better understanding of what materials are used in transport. We then looked at our current status and the things that came out were that there's limited recycling. We use a lot of primary materials in in our transport systems, but also fuel and there's a lot of downcycling going on and very few materials are kept in a circular loop. 

In transport there's a lack of policy that enables regulations, although we do have regulation out there, it’s not fit for purpose. And we then tried to identify top priorities for enablers for our vision to 2050 and what challenges we might have.

1) Enabler - Setting international standards. 

2) Enabler - Producers responsibility for materials and what happens to materials at the end of their life, cascading use, recycling, minimize environmental impact.

3) Enabler - Forsighting studies- developing visions for technology in the future that take into consideration materials and material supply chains in more detail, which is something that's not happening much at the moment.

4) Challenge - Lack of data to understand material systems was a massive bottleneck when it comes to making decisions about circular economy.

5) Challenge - Lack of capacity within the UK for processing, recycling and refurbishing etc. How can we balance out carbon and circularity within transport systems that was something else that was highlighted.

We then went into our deep dives. We picked our top priority and tried to look at it:

1. A) Enabler - Producer responsibility: We spent quite a bit of time trying to define what this actually means. There was a lot of discussion about how the current system is very much value driven there's no holistic approach that takes into consideration different resources and materials in transport systems, not much focus on technology metals and other critical resources, low circularity incentives in terms of regulations.

Prof Steve Evans - Social Trends 

We were looking at social trends, which is a rather challenging topic. We're not trying to predict exactly how society specifically will change as a whole between now and 2050, but some things threw themselves out at us. We spent a lot of time talking about ownership change, that there might be a sense in which owning a car is actually seen as bad, as some sort of evil.

But clearly shared ownership is likely to increase.
Sharing is blurred. Are you sharing it with other people in your street or are you sharing it through a service like Uber.

Another big trend is going to be that we're going to be buying more stuff that will be delivered to the door. You know, we might go to the shop, but we might not drive back. We might cycle to the shop, cycle back and the delivery will arrive. We talked about life while moving around. So with autonomy, with being on trains and planes we’re not actually engaged with the act of driving. Therefore life is different. But also we talked about moving while living. So employment is going to change and as we've seen under COVID-19. Maybe people will commute less. We talked about those types of changes and out of that we identified a number of enablers and a number of blockers. There are a couple of the enablers, like the government’s desire for Net Zero and Leveling Up.

That desire has to be implemented into very practical things, which might then become very positive enablers.

We talked about recycling technology and the recycling industry, which could be enablers but e

qually, if they go down particular directions could become blockers on the blocker side.

We identified one major thing, which I think is going to be a theme and that is system design. So you will see people like Ford designing cars, Shell designing fuel, and Uber designing mobility services. But actually, if you want a circular mobility system, those people have to work really closely together.

We took 2 of the challenges and worked them up in detail and we deliberately chose a really awkward one:   

1) Dispute over public space . I really love this one. What happens when you don't have a car, but Uber has purchased the car parking space outside of your house? And they keep parking a high sided van in there and stealing the utility of your view?

And we had a really interesting conversation about who owns the roads. How do we tax the roads? Are those public spaces anymore, or are they becoming privatized? That was a really interesting debate.

 
The other debate that we had was on 2) Design of service in one dimension, not integrating different actors and other dimensions. How do we balance the desire for personalization? I want my car to be mine and to be really comfortable for me and my family but this is not my car. I don't own it.

So that's another particular design challenge.

Prof Richard Murphy - Supply Chains 

Our topic was: “What will be the material supply chains with CE principles In 2050?” and we concentrated largely on material supply change and CE principles. We didn't spend much time on what will be the material supply chains, so that's something we'd like to pick up in the deep dive.

The things we identified in terms of future vision was a need for a clear understanding of life cycles of materials and down cycles and the like, for recovery and recycling. A strong point was made about transitioning to a low carbon economy, requiring new supply chains.

There needs to be design with circular principles in mind from the word go.  

Academic research emerged as a theme, so that we can understand and align the challenges that are coming.

LCA also came out, as it did in other tables.

We identified blockers and enablers such as government funding, international agreements, legislation and standards; Economics, both as a positive and as a negative.

So if the regulation and legislation is right, then the economics might turn more favorable than they are at present. In terms of blockers the economics, in a number of cases recovery and recycling are really pretty unfavorable. And unless something is done to adjust that, this will probably remain so.

There was also a piece about political will to think in terms of systems and system thinking. Integrative thinking came through very strongly.

The current status, the materials supply chains, a number of issues were pointed: Securing supply chains by having a government and industry working together. There were some very good examples in aerospace sector for closed and open loop recycling.

From those discussions, we picked out 4 deep dive areas:

1) Poor economics  

2) Lack of big picture or collaborative thinking

3) Industrial Symbiosis in practice was seen as an opportunity

4) International agreements and essentially legislation agreements can pave the way towards these new supply chains.