Sustainable Materials - with both eyes open
- When?
- Thursday 24 November 2011, 13.00 hrs to 14.00 hrs
- Open to:
- Public, Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Julian Allwood, University of Cambridge
- Admission price:
- No charge
20% of the world's CO2 emissions from energy and processes arise in the production of just five materials: steel, cement, plastic, paper and aluminium. Demand for these materials is likely to double in the next 40 years, but the industries that make them are already very efficient, so if we look ahead with one eye open - pursuing energy and process efficiencies only - we can't make a significant reduction in their impact. However if, in addition, we look ahead with both eyes open - looking for opportunities to pursue material efficiency, to deliver the same services with less new material - we can make a much greater reduction in our impacts. This talk, based on the £1.5m EPSRC funded WellMet2050 project, will explore the realities of future material efficiency, particularly for steel and aluminium goods.
Julian Allwood leads the Low Carbon and Materials Processing research group in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge (lcmp.eng.cam.ac.uk). The first 10 years of his career were funded by contracts with the Alcoa Technical Centre in Pittsburgh. In 1996 he was appointed as a lecturer in mechanical engineering at Imperial College, and moved to Cambridge in 2000. His research group, currently 15 people, focuses on the technologies and systems of energy, material and resource efficiency, largely related to metals. Current projects include exploration of material efficiency in metals, development of novel metal forming processes, technologies for toner print removal to allow paper-reuse, identification and evaluation of options for future carbon emissions reductions in consumer goods, and development of an online tool for visualising future global and regional resource scenarios.
He is a vice Chairman of the International Academy of Production Engineering (CIRP), and since 2007 has been joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Materials Processing Technology. He has been appointed as a Lead Author for the chapter on mitigation in industry in the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report, to be published in 2014. In 2008 he was awarded a 5-year £1.4m EPSRC Leadership Fellowship to lead a major project on the global carbon emissions targets for steel and aluminium in collaboration with a consortium of 20 global companies spanning the metals supply chain (www.wellmet2050.com).
This has led to the book “Sustainable Materials: with both eyes open” co-authored with Jonathan Cullen, published by UIT and is in stock at Appleseed bookshop, right here on campus near the Library in LRC Building 01483689169 www.surrey.ac.uk/appleseed or also at www.withbotheyesopen.com