Unidentified female voice: The current world population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. Combined with the growing middle class in countries that are developing, this creates an ever-increasing demand for products, services, technology, and energy. These all require strategic elements and critical materials. These elements and materials are crucial to our modern lives, underpinning clean energy technologies, auto-mobility, aviation, modern electrical devices, the pharmaceutical industry, and a whole host of other everyday products and services. Previously, the UK has considered its critical materials strategy in the context of being part of the European Union. However, with the vote of Brexit, there is the need for the UK to develop policy to consider what resources are critical to the UK's industrial strategy, and how it plans to meet the needs of UK manufacturing. The naturally occurring deposits of certain elements are not uniformly distributed around the globe. By way of example, deposits of lithium, which are used in batteries for electronic devices and electric vehicles, are primarily located in Chile and Australia. Niobium, which is essential to efficient aircraft engines, gas turbines, and future fusion reactor technologies, is predominantly produced by Brazil. Platinum group metals, which are used in jewellery, fuel cells, and as catalysts, are largely from South Africa and Russia. China has a dominant position in the supply of many light and heavy rare earth elements, as well as a wealth of other critical materials. Where materials are of key economic importance but at a risk of short supply, we need to consider other approaches to obtain these strategic elements and critical materials.
Dr Paul Anderson: We will explore how to mitigate the impact of materials criticality through approaches such as substitution, regulation, reduction, and finally reuse through recovery recycling and concepts such as urban mining and the development of entirely new industrial ecologies.
Dr Allan Walton: The Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Materials encompasses expertise from across the Birmingham Energy Institute, in Biosciences, Chemical Engineering Chemistry, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Economics, Law, Material Science, Physics, and Social Science.
Professor Lynne Macaskie: We're working on the development of new methods and new technologies to enable the recovery of critical elements from end-of-life materials, from wastes, from scraps, and even from road dusts.
Dr Angela Murray: We've developed novel technologies that allow us to recover very small concentrations of critical elements from wastes. One of the challenges that we face is recovering metals at concentrations as low as 5 parts per million.
Dr Rustam Stolkin: We have previously developed advanced robotics methods for sorting and segregating dangerous nuclear-waste, but we are now looking at how to transfer those technologies to automatic sorting of other kinds of complex waste streams, in order to efficiently separate valuable materials for recycling.
Dr Richard Sheridan: We are looking at ways to reuse components containing strategic and critical elements, and developing new processing techniques to use these materials more efficiently. For example, we have technology to recover neodymium rare earth magnets from computer hard drives, electric vehicle motors, and wind turbines.
Dr Paramaconi Rodriguez: We are looking at how to produce nanoparticles for catalysis that reduce the quantity of critical materials use. The development of nanomaterials will be key to the development of next-generation polymer electrolyte fuel cells, photovoltaics, and lithium-ion battery technologies.
Dr Etienne Baranoff: An important focus of the Centre is also on the substitution of either the technology or the critical elements contained within a wide range of products. For example, light-emitting diodes contain elements that can emit light when exposed to UV light, but these are often in short supply.
Unidentified female voice: The University of Birmingham has significant research activity and strategic and critical elements across many disciplines. For example: recycling and efficient use of rare earth metals in magnets; replacement of lithium and cobalt in batteries; and efficient use and replacement of precious metals for catalysis and platinum group metals.
Professor Robert Elliott: The problems encountered by strategic elements and critical materials are often driven by economic and political factors, and this draws on expertise from across the campus, including the Business School, Social Science, and Law.
Professor Martin Freer: The Birmingham Energy Institute is a collaboration of about 100 researchers across the University, working on everything from technology through to economics and business models. We work with a wider collaboration of the Energy Research Accelerator, and that is six Midlands universities working on some of the national challenges that we have around energy, with international partners like the Fraunhoffer. The new Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Materials comes at just the right moment. It's a fantastic initiative. It comes at a time when Birmingham City Council is wrestling with its own challenges around waste management. This is a fantastic opportunity for the Centre to work with the city around solving those issues.
