A consortium of six UK universities is engineering microbes to turn industrial waste—from unrecyclable plastics to CO₂—into new chemicals and materials, keeping carbon in a productive loop rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. The problem is that much of the waste from chemical manufacturing cannot be recycled, and the sector still relies on fossil fuels as feedstocks. Current disposal methods, such as incineration or landfill, release embedded carbon as emissions. This Hub aims to replace those linear processes with a circular one: capture the carbon already in waste streams and use engineered biology to convert it into high-value chemicals, fuels, or even soil-improving biochar. If successful, the approach could defossilise large parts of the UK chemical manufacturing industry—a sector that underpins everything from pharmaceuticals to plastics but currently contributes heavily to carbon emissions. The Hub also plans to build a dedicated BioFactory to bridge lab discoveries with national scale-up facilities, accelerating commercial adoption. A Data Intelligence Unit will embed environmental and economic assessments into every stage, ensuring that the solutions are not just technically viable but genuinely sustainable. The result would be a net-zero circular bioeconomy where waste becomes feedstock, and carbon stays out of the atmosphere.
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The Carbon-Loop Sustainable Biomanufacturing Hub (C-Loop) partners, drawn from six world-leading UK institutions, have pioneered use of engineering biology technologies to valorize industrial waste by capturing and reusing the embedded carbon in sustainable biomanufacturing processes. These innovations have the potential to address carbon emissions and recover carbon from currently unrecyclable waste, and further, to defossilize industrial manufacturing processes that are reliant on finite resources and contribute to further carbon emissions. With a growing population, diminishing resources and a changing climate, there is now a pressing environmental, industrial and political imperative to rapidly utilize these engineering biology technologies to defossilize manufacturing and accelerate the UK’s path to net-zero. The Hub’s objectives are aligned to four key manufacturing challenges that must be overcome to enable industry uptake of innovative bio-upcycling technologies: Objective 1. Application to UK industry: (UoE, UoM, UoN, IC, UCL) C-Loop will use state-of-the-art analytical facilities to characterise industrial waste streams. The appropriate spoke(s) will be engaged to investigate utilisation of the waste streams according to their area of expertise, and market interest in the bio-upcycling product. The Hub will assess new waste streams and biomanufacturing pathway opportunities throughout the programme, as new industrial partners engage. Objective 2. Accelerated development & scale-up: (UoE, IC, IBioIC, CPI) C-loop will combine automated and AI and ML guided technologies with process optimisations for rapid progression of engineering biology workflows. Critically, the Hub will link early-stage bioprocess studies to national scale-up facilities, via a newly established BioFactory to bridge early-stage discoveries with UK scale-up facilities for rapid technology commercialization. Objective 3. Internal waste management: (UoE, UoN) C-Loop will pioneer bio-upcycling of CO2 and biomass arising from biomanufacturing processes to be re-used as a feedstock or be converted to biochar for UK land reclamation, soil improvement and carbon storage. Objective 4. Climate & economic assessment: (UoS, UoE) A dedicated Data Intelligence Unit will embed environmental and economic assessments and AI-led process optimization tools throughout all Hub processes. The C-Loop Hub comprises a multidisciplinary team of leading engineering biologists, chemists, analytical and computational scientists, with bioprocess engineers and life-cycle assessment experts. Building on existing collaborations, but working as a collective for the first time, C-Loop will establish a Hub (at UoE) and spoke model to provide a streamlined and holistic platform for workable and sustainable biomanufacturing solutions. Working alongside industry partners and national scale-up facilities, the Hub aims to enable the UK chemical manufacturing sector to adopt transformative engineering biology technologies that will allow the re-use of carbon embedded within waste streams. C-Loop is co-created with established industry partners, including those who can supply waste streams for upcycling and those who are end-users of the high value chemicals that will be produced. The hub-and-spoke model will provide a streamlined pathway for rapid acceleration of innovative, engineering biology-based, technologies to defossilize chemical manufacturing processes in the UK. This has the dual benefit of reducing carbon emissions from existing waste disposal processes and environmental pollution and propelling manufacturing towards a sustainable and net-zero circular bioeconomy. The bioeconomy sector will benefit from the development of new tools and guidelines for consistent and comparable analyses of bioprocess sustainability to demonstrate carbon efficiencies, and through the training of a multidisciplinary cohort of future research leaders with unique skillsets in quantitative sustainability assessment, bioprocess design, development and scale-up.
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