The UK throws away vast quantities of raw materials in its manufacturing processes, and this programme aims to stop that waste by redesigning how industry makes things. The problem is that current manufacturing is locked into inefficient patterns—factories, supply chains, and business models all assume cheap, plentiful resources. This creates a huge environmental cost from mining, processing, and discarding materials. The research tackles four specific barriers: mapping every possible way to design goods more efficiently, building a global database to track resource use, testing new manufacturing technologies in real industrial settings, and creating new economic metrics that reward efficiency over throughput. If successful, the programme could transform UK manufacturing without requiring new inventions. Instead, it would make existing production lines use fewer materials, generate less waste, and remain competitive as resource costs rise. The industrial consortium and policy champion ensure the findings reach factory floors and government offices, not just academic journals. A quarterly strategic analysis reports on resource issues, and an annual UK Forum on Resource Efficiency spreads best practice across sectors. The result would be a manufacturing sector that uses materials more like a closed loop than a one-way pipe.
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Resource Efficiency is essential for reducing the environmental impact of manufacturing. Progress in achieving it has been slow, but a rapidly changing international context, including Brexit, is giving new emphasis to Industrial Strategy in the UK which creates a unique window of opportunity. This transformational Programme aims to locate resource efficiency at the heart of a visionary industrial strategy; it will create new world-leading competitive advantage for UK manufacturing by addressing four fundamental barriers to progress: - to break out of lock-in to resource inefficiency, novel methods and tools will be developed to enumerate and characterise all today's options to design and manufacture material goods; - to create clarity about the environmental impact of new manufacturing strategies, a ground-breaking Physical Resources Observatory will be developed to access and interpret more and better global resource data; - to target manufacturing innovations for Resource Efficiency and accelerate their implementation, the features of an effective Innovation Pipeline will be characterised, tested and deployed with a portfolio of promising emerging manufacturing technologies; - to give new priority to Resource Efficiency in Industrial Strategy, new metrics and decision-framing will be developed and tested in the Living Lab of the Programme's industrial consortium. The Programme brings together nine internationally-leading academic groups and a consortium of subscribing industrial partners. The management strategy, designed for flexibility, aims to integrate existing methods from diverse disciplines to address the application of Resource Efficiency while stimulating exploration of new methodological opportunities where existing approaches are inadequate. The value of the investment in the Programme will be maximised through an International Advisory Panel to support connections and awareness, a consortium executive committee to determine priorities for strategic analysis, and a supervisory board to ensure financial and legal compliance. The programme will deliver impact via quarterly strategic analysis reports on resource issues, a programme of policy influence led by an experienced Policy Champion, technological innovations, an annual UK Forum on Resource Efficiency, commercial and open-access software tools, researcher training and multi-channel communications.
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