Can you introduce yourself and tell me a bit about your role within TransFIRe?

I’m Mark Jolly, Professor and Director of Manufacturing and Materials at Cranfield University and I’ve been in post for about three and a half years. I’m actually a metallurgist by background and worked in industry for many years before moving into academia.  After spending some time at Birmingham University, I moved to Cranfield about 10 years ago and became more and more interested in energy and sustainability. This led me to co-write and co-create the idea for the Transforming Foundation Industries Research and Innovation Hub, or TransFIRe.

My role in TransFIRe is really to get foundation industries and academics together, to get them to work in the same direction and think in the same way, to help reduce carbon emissions and get to the Government targets of net zero by 2050.

The programme is only three years long so we’re not going to be able to transform the whole foundation industries sector, but the vision is to try to get our partners to think in a different way, to move towards becoming more efficient and produce less waste, think about how we can use or reuse waste products or how we can make the products from these materials last longer. So, we are thinking about dematerialisation – can we reduce the consumption of the amount of material that we have to dig out of the ground but still maintain the quality of our life? That’s the big challenge!

 

At the end of the TransFIRe project, what do you think success would look like for you?

I think after three years, it would be great if we have a few examples of where industries have changed their behaviours, for example, that might be showing that they are now reusing waste energy or products themselves or across other sectors.

I also think success would be to start to change the public perception of these industries. We’ve seen all the news this week about British Steel and Tata being supported by the Government, to the tune of 300 million pounds, and I’m sure many people are thinking, “Why do we need steel?” and yet actually, you look around and steel is everywhere, in cars, in buildings, in infrastructure. So, if we can persuade society that we do need these industries, but that they need to be greener, and perhaps look different to a big blast furnace at the bottom of the road, then maybe people will accept them more into society.

 

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is a really important part of the agenda for TransFIRe.  What are some of the important things that you are doing to help address that in the foundation industries?

For the last three hundred years or so, this industry has been driven and run by, dare I say, white males and we need to change that. Unless we change the diversity within the teams that are working in these industries, we won’t change the thinking.

As part of our team, we have Professor Sue Black, who’s a major proponent of EDI and is developing an EDI strategy and playbook to be used both within the TransFIRe team and across the foundation industry partners. We’ve also got some great EDI examples within some of the companies that we’re working with that we will use as case studies for others. Sue is also a brilliant social communicator and one of the things that we’re talking about is how we do more communication to try to change the public’s perception of these industries.

I also think that with the movement towards digital, there’s a major opportunity for diversity. As the manufacturing industries begin to change the way they work, they are going to become more attractive to a wider range of people and we’ve just got to sell that story in a really exciting way!

 

What do you think are the biggest challenges in getting the foundation industries to change how they work?

One of the biggest challenges is innovation.

We’ve done a lot of work through working with the TransFIRe technical working group on how these industries innovate and it’s become very apparent that innovation doesn’t generally come from within the sectors, it’s almost imposed on them from outside, either by legislation, by their customers, or by their suppliers.

If you look at the UK, I believe we have moved away from having manufacturing at the core of our GDP and so a lot of companies have shut down their research centres due to financial directives.

I think this really stifles a lot of ways in which the organisation’s work in this country and it’s not attractive. Why would a young person want to go into a company in a sector that isn’t innovative and not doing something for the future? If we can help change that, that would be great.

One of the other aspects that we have picked up as a major hurdle going forward is the financial aspect. It’s how the finance sector sees the foundation industries and how they make funds available for them.

If I were to set up a tech company, in some new advanced, high-flying graphene-based technology, I could probably get millions of pounds of investment very easily even though that company will never have a major impact on global emissions. However, if I want to change a brickworks or a steel plant, which could potentially have a huge effect of reducing emissions, I would really struggle.

That’s the disconnect, the city and even Government don’t want to finance foundation fundamental materials and they won’t repair the cracks in the foundations.

There is no UK strategy for materials and if you look at the way materials are dealt with it is split up into all sorts of different areas which are not joined up. I think that again, if we can do anything in TransFIRe that brings that thinking together in terms of policy, that would also be a great outcome.

 

What can we expect in the remainder of the project?

I think you can expect a lot more output from the workstreams. As the results start to be produced, I’d like to see a lot more case studies, blogs, social media posts and papers to publicise and raise the profile of our work and help start change the public perception of the foundation industries.

 

How can other universities or commercial organisations get involved?

Universities or commercial organisations can easily get involved, they just have to talk to Sanjoo Paddea, our Business Development Manager at TransFIRe and then we can have a conversation about where they fit. What we would really like is to hear more from organisations in the supply chain who rely on the foundation industries as their suppliers. They are now the customers who want to have more sustainable materials and want to them to reduce their scope 3 carbon emissions directly!

If people were interested in working with us, then we can certainly have those conversations!