Saint-Gobain partner with the Henry Royce Institute to solve sustainability challenges

Saint-Gobain partnered with the Henry Royce Institute last week to bring together PhD students from across British Universities to consider how four sustainability challenges in Saint-Gobain could be solved.

Students came from chemistry, materials science, engineering, physics and nano-materials departments and spent 48 hours considering the sustainable innovation challenges set by Saint-Gobain. The students were set the challenge to use their collective expertise to consider how a range of Saint-Gobain manufactured materials specifically Glass, Plasterboard, Render and Insulation, could be innovated to reduce their embodied carbon and improve their product circularity through end of life recovery, for reuse or recycling, to enhance Saint-Gobain’s circular economy offering. 

The challenge was hosted by the Henry Royce Institute in Manchester who run the annual ‘Sandpit’ challenge to bring together expertise from academia in advanced materials and science to us rapid innovation processes to consider a sustainability challenge in industry.

Charnett Chau, Lifecycle Services Lead at Saint-Gobain UK explained more about the challenge: “The innovation challenge follows our collaboration with The University of Salford and Barratt Redrow Developments where we have constructed a Future Homes Standard Home in the Energy House 2.0 climate chamber at the University of Salford.  Our Life Cycle Assessment of that building, which will be published soon, highlighted how Saint-Gobain’s lightweight solutions can significantly reduce the embodied carbon of a whole building. The assessment also highlighted key areas of remaining embodied carbon in the building and provides a focus for our continued work to reduce the carbon embodied in our solutions and our supply chain. The Sandpit teams brought a huge amount of their critical thinking skill to approach. They really engaged in the topics, understanding the issues and worked well together to develop ideas for how the challenges could be solved. There were a number of interesting ideas, many of which we have either recently invested in (such as the automated optical glass cullet sorting we have invested in at our Eggborough glass factory), or we are actively working on (such as technology to recycle mineral wool insulation). We have been reviewing all the ideas of the teams and want to thank all the students who took part in the Sandpit Challenge for sharing their expertise and time”

The collaboration with the Henry Royce Institute is a great example of how a diverse group formed from many different specialisms can come together and quickly apply innovative thinking in an industry they have no connection with.