Obesity levels in the UK represent a key public health issue, with 67% of its population living with overweight or obesity. People living with obesity are more likely to experience a range of health issues including heart conditions, and Type 2 diabetes. They are also more likely to be living in areas of high deprivation. Reducing obesity levels has been a public health priority in the UK for decades but we have not yet managed to achieve that goal. This is partly due to the range of factors that influence body weight. One key challenge facing people living with obesity is being able to afford a healthy, balanced diet. Nutritionally poor and energy-dense foods that are often ultra-processed, are cheaper and more readily available. To start to address this challenge, we need better evidence on how to support healthier food purchasing patterns to improve their health and wellbeing, while considering environmental impact and sustainability. Food insecurity is 'the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food'. Families on low incomes are more likely to be food insecure and they spend a greater proportion (three quarters) of their monthly food budget in supermarkets. Supermarket promotions, advertising, and online product placement decisions can impact this group's access to healthy foods. Importantly, healthy diets also need to be sustainable in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, and land use; described as the 'sustainability footprint'. Our research will bring together food insecure people living with obesity, consumers, retailers, policy makers, and academics to co-develop and test strategies that can support future transformative potential in the food system. Our diverse team of academic experts in social science, applied health, obesity, and data science, will combine our knowledge of large-scale population data with an understanding of lived experiences of food shopping for people living with obesity and food to develop practical solutions to promote sustainable and healthier food choices in this group. To achieve this, we have designed an innovative four-part project. Perspective: we will work with people living with obesity and food insecurity to understand the key issues facing them while shopping. We will also engage with the retail sector and policy makers to understand their perspectives too. This will identify limitations and barriers of current strategies and scope out future opportunities for our project to make sure our work remains relevant and useful. Big Data: we will use anonymous large-scale data (from >1.6 million shoppers) obtained from a national high-street supermarket (retailer) to understand what foods people buy, how healthy these purchases are, their sustainability footprints and how these choices vary across different household types including those on low income. This will help identify in- store changes that would encourage healthier and more sustainable food purchasing for people living with obesity and food insecurity. Solution Space: we will use the findings from the first two parts of this project to co-design new approaches and test these in-store and online assess their effect on healthier and sustainable food purchasing behaviours. We will also test and measure the effectiveness of these strategies in a group of people who are actively seeking to lose weight (MoreLife patient cohort) and living with food insecurity. This will help to identify strategies that can help transform supermarkets to promote healthier and more sustainable foods. Delivery: we will engage with food producers, food retailers, patient groups, policy makers, and charity group representatives to ensure our project is relevant and transformative. We will do this by sharing our findings with those groups, using webinars, social media, workshops, and research briefing notes.

Enhancing the energy performance of existing buildings in the UK is a vital step in the Government's pathway to net-zero carbon. If environmental targets are to be reached, R&D is required to understand the capabilities of low carbon technologies and how digital services can be used to better manage their energy use. In this context, novel building control approaches that can be derived from data-driven, cloud-based solutions is of high interest for building owners and operators who soon will need to upgrade outdated building management systems (BMS). Yet today there is limited implementation of such solutions due to 'hidden' installation costs, lack of standards and modularity and 'risk averse' attitudes in the building sector. Bridging the gap between the academic literature and real-world applications is hence paramount to support live implementation and explore the potential of greater connectivity. Under this context, the DEMSIS project employs a supermarket as a case study and uses it as a test bed to implement in real-time a model predictive control (MPC) scheme to enhance HVAC and refrigeration systems; the two most energy intensive services in a supermarket which are responsible for 45-60% of a store's overall electricity usage. MPC schemes work by predicting how a system will respond to a control change over the next 12-24 hours, considering other relevant forecasts such as energy prices and weather data. By understanding these future states, it allows the system to pre-emptively prepare for, for example, high electricity prices or cold weather, hence reducing its overall energy and carbon usage. As well as developing this control logic, the required hardware and software infrastructure will be designed and deployed in the pilot store to allow for real-world testing of the proposed MPC schemes. The proposed modelling and software framework will be replicable across a wide range of commercial buildings, lowering the barrier to entry for many businesses across the UK. Furthermore, due to the flexible nature of MPC formulation the proposed approach could incorporate additional constraints related to demand-side management for the grid, e.g. ensuring power thresholds aren't breached during peak periods. The challenge for researchers in this field is how best to integrate the abundant data being captured to coordinate the management of systems to reduce energy use in buildings. A combination of hardware components and software tools are required to update existing legacy control systems. If such upgrades take place, the academic literature suggests there is significant potential in enhancement of operational management by applying internet-of-things concepts to support real-time optimisation. In this project the researchers collaborate with a major food retailer (Sainsbury's Supermarkets) to implement cutting edge solutions that give insights into how future buildings should be operated. The DEMSIS project has as key objectives to: 1. Provide recommendations on the best hardware and software solutions that are compatible with existing controllers (e.g., HVAC). 2. Quantify the business case for implementing such novel solutions in a commercial building by conducting multiple tests in the supermarket. 3. Outline the technical and commercial barriers building operators are facing to implement smart control schemes. 4. Propose new key performance indicators that provide information on how heating and refrigeration systems are performing. 5. Give insights on how control cloud-based solutions can support the UK power system with regards to demand side management and smart-grid applications. Findings from the project will support enabling a cost-effective transition towards smarter digital services for the built environment. Transferring knowledge to key stakeholders in academia, industry, and policy makers responsible for the decarbonisation of the property sector.

The food and drink industry has stringent performance requirements for product packaging, which ensures food safety, increases consumer experience and reduces food wastage. Packaging contains the product and protects against degradation during transport, storage, and display. This has led to increasing use of multi-layer packaging, which has excellent barrier properties and is thin and lightweight but also single use. The layers can be comprised of paper board, aluminium, and various types of plastic. The lack of recycling technology has resulted in part of the retail sector considering substituting multi-layer materials with single-layer materials, which are currently easier to recycle, however, this will come at the expense of packaging performance and likely increase the weight of the packaging relative to the packaged goods. We want to develop novel recycling solutions for multi layered packaging containing plastics bonded with other materials. We propose a novel integration of traditional mechanical recycling with new (bio) chemical recycling methods. For chemical recycling, we aim to selectively target glue layers to separate the main material layers by dissolving the glue through enzymatic and chemical leaching; low-cost functional ionic liquids will dissolve the glue and utilise their known propensity to extract dyes and dissolve metals. Breakdown of the glue will be catalysed by the ionic liquid itself, or, if it does not have sufficient catalytic power, by stabilised biocatalysts which will be modified to exhibit stability and hyperactivity in the liquid due to a cutting-edge stabilisation method which enables enzymes to be active at temperatures above the boiling point of water. The study of bio(chemical) recycling for multi-layer materials is accompanied by a comprehensive study of the mechanical shredding process to determine the impact of forces on material separation and the damage experienced by the various materials as they are subjected to the (bio)chemical leaching and shredding. The optimal shredded particle size will be determined leading to maximum conservation of mechanical properties of the layer materials and optimal energy use during the integrated hybrid recycling. The mechanical recycling step can be performed: (i) before the (bio)chemical process, in which case the geometry of the shredded pieces will be crucial for enhancing mixing and the reaction rate, or (ii) after the (bio)chemical process carried out with pre-swollen multi-layer materials, in which case the effect of the already degraded adhesion between the layers and lower friction due to the presence of the liquid will be exploited. We will also consider separation of the treated multi-material mixtures, such as sedimentation, flotation, anti-solvent precipitation or solvent extraction and electrodeposition of dissolved components. We will evaluate the various possible configurations of the combined mechanical, chemical and biochemical approach using a high-level technoeconomic analysis, with energy input as the key performance indicator. Although we have chosen food and drink MLP packaging as a proof-of-concept, our approach can be extended to recycling other multi-layered, multicomponent materials for a vast variety of applications, as well as unsorted plastic waste. The recycling method will allow us to continue to harness the benefits of multi-layer packaging while also enabling a much-needed circular economy, preserving economic value, which in turn will incentivise reduction of waste leakage into the environment.

The accurate description of apple cultivars is a challenge because many of the characters relate to subtle features of the fruit, and it has hitherto been unclear which is the minimum set of characters to provide an optimal description. An undergraduate project carried out this year at Reading, utilizing apple accessions from the National Fruit Collections at Brogdale, has made significant progress towards the objective of identifying a key morphological character set. Most interestingly, computer-aided shape analysis has indicated that apple shape appears to be a particularly powerful character when appropriately quantified. The project also showed that colour, previously used only qualitatively, can also be quantified using colourimetry and offers considerable potential as a character. Allied to description is identification. There is much interest, both amateur and commercial, in rapid and effective identification of apples. Examples range from the identification of 'that apple at the bottom of the garden', to the commercially significant problem of identifying apples (for sale on supermarket shelves) which are not what they claim to be. There are however, many thousands of apple cultivars in the world: the National Apple Register of the UK lists approx. 6,000 apple cultivars known to have been grown in the UK between 1853 and 1968; and there are over 2,000 cultivars of apple currently held in the National Fruit Collections at Brogdale. Objective identification is very difficult and only a few experts with many years experience can name cultivars by their appearance. DNA-based identification is expensive, slow and destructive. Computerised image analysis offers the potential to reduce thousands of possibilities down to a few tens of possibilities where manual identification is practical for those with less experience. In combination with a few other (easily-measured) characters the number of possibilities could be reduced still further until only cultivar differences relating, for example, to taste, or subtleties in colour patterning are likely to remain. Our PhD project would extend the preliminary analysis already carried out to include a much wider range of apple cultivars; it would develop the computer-aided analysis of shape and establish a definitive character set for identification. It would contrast the results obtained using a morphological approach with DNA marker methods (microsatellites and Diversity Array Technology, DArT). Alongside this scientific work, we would develop an image-analysis Web-based system with a view to providing an on-line identification service, requiring the input of a small number of key character measurements, including an appropriate photographic image of the unknown apples. The aim would be to provide a preliminary identification, associated probability of correctness, and possible alternatives. The student would also, in conjunction with Sainsbury's, explore the suitability of the approach for development of an identification system to allow automated identification of off-types in variety-specific lines of fruit. The potential wider applications of shape analysis to other fresh produce would also be explored.

Non-domestic buildings account for approximately 18% of UK carbon emissions and 13% of final energy consumption. In contrast to domestic buildings, which can be well characterised by a few representative archetypes, the non-domestic sector is highly diverse incorporating a range of built forms to satisfy the needs of commercial, retail, public service, and other end-use sectors. These assets are also very long-lasting and it is estimated that 70% of the UK's current non-domestic buildings will still be in service in 2050. Consequently a major challenge is to design technologies and operating strategies that support a transformation of existing non-domestic buildings into efficient buildings compatible with the UK's energy and climate policy goals. Facilities managers must balance people (the occupants), place (the building's context), and processes (the installed equipment) in order to deliver agreed levels of building services to occupants, of which energy services are particularly important. However, experience has shown that the variability of occupant behaviour and long-term changes in the demand for energy services creates significant challenges for maintaining highly efficient building energy systems. Furthermore it cannot be taken for granted that future innovations will overcome these barriers. New technologies and business models - such as smart meters, heat pumps, phase change materials, real-time pricing, pervasive sensing, and more - will bring with them implicit assumptions about buildings and their occupants and facilities managers will again need to determine how they can be installed and operated effectively, in an integrated fashion. Therefore, although the future holds significant technical potential for improving the energy efficiency of non-domestic buildings, experience suggests that none of these innovations will remove the need for fundamental improvements in the energy management of non-domestic buildings, and indeed provide more opportunities for optimisation. The proposed three-year research project will therefore develop and demonstrate novel adaptive methods both to improve the energy performance of existing buildings and to ensure that these gains are preserved in the face of technological and societal change. This will be achieved by working with partners representing the education, commercial, and retail sectors, thus delivering immediate impact to the energy management of their buildings and also enabling the developed techniques to be sufficiently flexible for widespread use in other non-domestic buildings. The research will therefore help the UK transform its building stock to meet a range of energy and climate policy goals, while enabling the facilities management industry to demonstrate new products and services for domestic and international markets.