Cold plasma is an exciting new technology with a proven potential for rapid microbial decontamination of surfaces. A plasma state is generated by applying a high voltage to a gas, transforming it into a cocktail of reactive plasma species which may have high oxidation potential and therefore considerable food decontamination potential. Prepared produce decontamination is necessary to remove soil, foreign bodies and bacteria (potentially pathogenic) from the food surface but is notoriously difficult to achieve. Moreover, the different decontamination techniques used so far (chlorination, rapid chilling, et.c…) are applied on the product before it is packed meaning recontamination can occur from further handling prior to packing. This project proposes the use of a novel pulsed plasma system to inject plasma species in the food packaging at the point of sealing, thus providing a final decontamination hurdle directly in the pack without further recontamination risk. The objectives of the project are to prove this concept and demonstrate the improved shelf life and safety of a variety of food products (prepared salads, prepared fruit, prepared vegetables) .

Addressing plastic waste is rapidly evolving into one of the key environmental challenges facing humankind. It is a global problem, notably leading to an excess of plastic pollution in the ocean and the wider environment. Considerable effort is needed along the entire life cycle of plastics - from sourcing of raw materials to manufacturing, to use and recycling - to create solutions for waste from numerous plastic product groups in modern society from aerospace components to children's toys. Recent advances in marine biology, oceanography and marine eco-toxicology have helped provide urgency to the issue, as we begin to realize the wider implications of excess plastic waste in the environment. There is a need for solutions to these problems across the entire space of plastic and how it interacts with consumers and manufacturers. We propose to tackle the challenges associated with plastic waste along two general thrusts: (1) resource preservation; and (2) waste prevention. Resource preservation: minimising virgin material extraction. Within this thread we will focus on the design, manufacturing and recycling challenges associated with plastics. These will include developing new technologies that utilise cleaner and more recyclable plastic alternatives, new recycling and recovery processes, better design of end products (to promote re-use or recycling or improve performance and lifetime) and the development of guidelines to design for biodegradability. Taken together, this will create a new plastic economy, where plastic materials are made from renewable feedstocks (rather than petroleum), are easier to recover from waste after use, can be easily recycled, and are designed to biodegrade once they reach the environment. We will couple this with new product designs aimed to encourage consumers to recycle these materials rather than target them for disposal, by designing the look and feel of the products to encourage treating reuse and recycling as a "badge of honour" rather than a burden. Waste prevention: making fewer resources flow continuously. Within this thread we will focus on distribution, use and end-of-life challenges associated with plastics. These will include studying how to bring about more acceptance of recycled materials, promotion of the circular economy (e.g. reuse, refill, and the sharing economy) within the general public. This will be a consumer-focussed and policy-oriented approach to rethinking how we interact with plastics as a society. Policy and behaviour changes will be linked to the design of the new materials to ensure a whole product that is both technically robust, harmless, and easy to re-use. As an example, we will determine how best to drive a shift towards plastics-free distribution and consumption of goods, re-use and repurposing of plastics, and how we can encourage plastic recycling rather than disposal. This will require a high-level view of how plastics move within the UK economy, an understanding of consumer-plastic interactions and what leads to plastic waste ending up in the environment rather than recycling bins. This will enable us to develop new strategies to change purchase, use, disposal and environmental clean-up behaviours to improve plastic lifetime and inform legislation and policy changes to incentivise behaviour change by consumers. We bring together deep understanding of the complexity of the value chain and the dependencies between material performance, chemical composition and environmental impacts. We appreciate the need for societal change, in policy, industry and society, to deploy the right interventions for the short and long term. As this grant would build on robust existing activity at Imperial, our strategy is to propose several small feasibility studies aimed at novel solutions for tackling the larger problem areas and integrating technology development with consumer and policy change, eliminating the current meme of single-use plastic packaging.

Our vision is to maximise the food potential of UK pasture by using targeted chemical processing and novel biotechnology to convert grass into nutritious edible fractions for healthier and more affordable alternative foods, making UK agriculture more resilient and sustainable. Our proposal aims to use novel chemical processing methods to extract the central edible fractions from grass (protein, digestible carbohydrates, vitamins, lipids, fibre) before culturing the yeast Metschnikowia pulcherrima on the cellulosic fraction to produce mycoprotein and a lipid suitable as a palm oil substitute. These ingredients will then be combined in a range of alternative meat and dairy products, displacing environmentally damaging imported ingredients currently used. Further processing of the waste products from the process will produce nutrient rich fertilizers and help create a model for future circular farming economies. When optimised this process would only need 10 to 15kg of fresh grass (20% dry matter content) to produce 1kg of edible food ingredients, of which approximately 25% would be lipid and 35% protein. Whilst not entirely comparable on a nutritional basis this represents a ten-fold increase in productivity compared to cattle raised for meat, or twice the productivity of dairy cows. By converting grass into edible food components, a number of advantages are realised including: - UK produced substitutes for palm oil, soya protein, and other imported food ingredients. This has environmental benefits in the UK and abroad. It will provide UK produced healthy nutritional substitutes for ingredients grown on former rainforest sites, whilst significantly reducing food miles; - Produce UK food substitutes for over two billion pounds worth of annual food imports, with the opportunity to export significant quantities of surplus produce; - Improved UK resilience to climate change as grass is more resilient to flooding and other extreme weather conditions than most other crops; - As the process is feedstock agnostic, it should work equally well with wildflower rich pasture grass. This potentially enables the reintroduction of grasslands with greater biodiversity without having an impact on the grasses usability, an environmentally beneficial by-product of the process; - Providing a commercially viable non-livestock based market for forage production that would also allow arable land that is prone to flooding to profitably return to meadow grass production; - The profitable inclusion of grass in arable rotations to help combat blackgrass and other pesticide resistant weeds; - At present, in some areas it is uneconomic to build and maintain livestock fencing, resulting in grassland in these regions having little commercial agricultural value. These grasslands will now become commercially viable, and contribute to UK food production; - Limited risk in scaling up as there is no need to invest in new farm machinery, existing forage equipment and storage facilities will suffice and the bio-processing technology is mature and already used for many other industrial applications; - Opportunities for investment in a new UK food industry; - With the production of more digestible fractions, this project would produce more sustainable, UK sourced, feed for monogastric livestock; - Initial research suggests that sufficient unutilised grass is available for the P2P process, therefore, this system should have little or no impact on grass supplies for dairy and livestock farming.

This cross-disciplinary project aims to develop novel data mining and visualization tools and techniques, which will transform people's ability to analyse quantitative and coded longitudinal data. Such data are common in many sectors. For example, health data is classified using a hierarchy of hundreds of thousands of Read Codes (a thesaurus of clinical terms), with analysts needing to provide business intelligence for clinical commissioning decisions, and researchers tacking challenges such modelling disease risk stratification. Retailers such as Sainsbury's sell 50,000+ types of products, and want to combine data from purchasing, demographic and other sources to understand behavioural phenomena such as the convenience culture, to guide investment and reduce waste. To solve these needs, public and private sector organisations require an infrastructure that provides far more powerful analytical tools than are available today. Today's analysis tools are deficient because they (a) are crude for assessing data quality, (b) often involve analysis techniques are designed to operate on aggregated, rather than fine-grained, data, and (c) are often laborious to use, which inhibits users from discovering important patterns. The QuantiCode project will address these deficiencies by bringing together experts in statistics, modelling, visualization, user evaluation and ethics. The project will be based in the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA), which houses the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre (£5m ES/L011891/1) and the MRC Medical Bioinformatics Centre (£7m ES/L011891/1), and provides a development facilities complete with high-performance computing (HPC), visualization and safe rooms for sensitive data. Our project will deliver proof of concept visual analytic systems, which we will evaluate with a wide variety of users drawn from our partners and researchers/external users based in LIDA. At the outset of the project we will engage with our partners to identify analysis use cases and requirements that drive the details of our research, which is divided into four workpackages (WPs). WP1 (Data Fusion) will develop governance principles for the analysis of fine-grained data from multiple sources, implement tools to substantially reduce the effort of linking those sources, and develop new techniques to visualize completeness, concordance, plausibility, and other aspects of data quality. WP2 (Analytical Techniques) and WP3 (Abstraction Models) are the project's technical core. WP2 will deliver a new, robust approach for modelling data as they appear naturally in health and retail data (irregularly dispersed or sampled over time), scaling that approach with stochastic control to guide learning and resource usage, and developing a low-effort 'question-posing' visual interface to drastically lower the human effort of investigating data and finding patterns. WP3 (Abstraction Models) focuses on data granularity, and will deliver a tool that implements a working version of the governance principles we develop in WP1, and new computational and interactive techniques for exploring abstraction spaces to create inputs suited to each aspect of analysis. WP4 will implement the above tools and techniques in three versions of our proof of concept system, evaluating each with our partners and LIDA researchers/users. This will ensure that our solutions are compatible with, and scale to, challenging real-world data analysis problems. Success criteria will be time saved, increased analysis scope, notable insights, and tackling previously unfeasible types of analysis - all compared against a baseline provided by users' current analysis tools. We will encourage adoption via showcases, workshops and licensed installations at our partners' sites. The project's legacy will include tools that are embedded as an integral part of the LIDA infrastructure, a plan for their on-going development, and a research roadmap.

Today, 'Big' customer retail market data are created in many areas, including grocery retailing, energy, health and wellbeing, insurance, mobile communications and retail banking. Such data represent ever greater proportions of the total data collected about citizens and are almost exclusively accumulated by the private sector. Analysis of such sources can offer many new insights into contemporary lifestyles. Our vision is to create a service that will open up the data resources routinely collected by the retail business sector to academic research, training and capacity building. Crucially, this will be done in ways that users in academia, business and government will find efficient, effective and safe to use. Retail Business Datasafe (RBDS) will allow users to access new sources of data from organisations, and receive authoritative advice on such data and their quality and the ways in which they can be linked to official surveys, administrative data or social media sources. There will also be a full and novel range of related Big Data research training and capacity building activities, developed in close association with the retail industry. RBDS will provide focus for ESRC's interests in the retail sector and its commitments to capacity building in relation to Big Data research skills. It will also develop a wider service role for other social science research that will benefit from the availability of consumer data. RBDS will do this by building upon the recent achievements of the ESRC Retail Research and Data Initiative, in order to develop a sustainable national partnership between the academic, retail and government sectors. This will foster the co-production of skills and knowledge and see the wider deployment of consumer data in academic, business and government research. As such, RBDS will be a strategic and complementary initiative to the ESRC's investments in Big Data centres for administrative and social media data by collating different retail datasets safely and anonymously for research purposes. In this radical and transformative initiative, RBDS will work with retailers to devise and implement data services that provide safe and effective access for the academic, business and government communities, and engage the retail industry in problems of common concern. The work will build on the recommendations of the Administrative Data Taskforce (ADT) with respect to release, security and anonymisation. It will also link to best practices for scientific analysis and visualisation of retail data in the United States, propelling the UK to world leadership in reuse of consumer data for the public good. The advent of Big Data in social science applications has led to a growing need for capacity to undertake research using large, complex and linked datasets. To this end, RBDS will develop a range of advanced training and CPD initiatives that will foster collaboration with a full range of academic disciplines, and provide businesses with access to researchers and skills through knowledge exchange opportunities. RBDS will also facilitate linkage of data generated and held by the UKDS and other ESRC Big Data centres with those from the private sector. A fundamental problem with Big Data arising from retail transactions, in common with many sources, is that their provenance is unknown. RBDS will thus develop methods and use other Data Centre investments to assess the robustness and reliability of retailer data relative to administrative and other official data sources. RDBS will work with the UK Data Service (UKDS) to preserve data that will provide retailers and academics alike with insights into medium and long term trends in retailing. Its split site location will be shared by the UCL Chorley Institute (an open plan office environment dedicated to multidisciplinary research), in dedicated refurbished space at the University of Liverpool and in the Oxford Institute of Retail Management.