Fully Funded PhD Project: Waste recycling, resource efficiency and circular - the future food supply chain - a triadic Life Cycle Assessment, de-risking and socio-economic scenario perspective

Research Group: Advanced Resource Efficiency Centre (AREC)

The Advanced Resource Efficiency Centre (AREC) promotes collaboration between industry and academia, and provides a platform for access to policy makers in order to meet the challenge of promoting resource efficiency and sustainability across supply chains.
AREC supports the development of resource sustainable supply chains by proposing new ways of reducing risk for partners in overcoming the challenges of resource availability. Through AREC, Small & Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) can join in collaboration with larger industrial partners and benefit from cutting edge academic research and skills. This provides the mechanism for achieving the aims of the UK Government and EU policy, in supporting an environment in which the 4.8 million UK-based SMEs can flourish with their supply chains in Europe and internationally.

Project Description

The United Nation Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) identified 17 priority areas where the biggest environmental, social and economic challenges in the World need to be addressed. Major funding opportunities in the Global Challenge Research Fund calls for large scale, cross disciplinary and systems level approach in research to support delivery of SDGs with partners globally.
To help address some of the global challenges in the SDGs - such as SDG2 Zero Hunger (Food Security), SDG7 Affordable and Clean Energy, SDG12 Responsible Consumption and Production, SDG13 Climate Action – the Advanced Resource Efficiency Centre (AREC) is focusing on finding novel and integrated systems to manage transition of existing stakeholders’ supply chain (business, government, NGO and society) from a structure traditionally governed by rigid transactional process to a fluid, circular and closed loop process. The traditional process is not resilient and its exposure to externalities such as climate change risk, financial risk and geo-political risk often result in compromises. The risks are not only affecting the processes but also the critical infrastructure such as land, transport and energy systems, which underpin the flow and conversion of resources to products and services (forward and reverse). To achieve this, we need future supply chains that are resource efficient, whilst able to encourage sustainable and clean growth.

Based in Sheffield University Management School, this project will explore a new resilience model for future food supply chain: a triadic Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), de-risking and socio-economic scenario perspective (focus on Mekong region, China and Africa, industry case studies includes Nestle and Unilever)

Application Process:

Applicants should submit a 1000 word research proposal which directly addresses the theme and/or specific topic to which they are applying. The proposal should contain a brief background to the topic, which demonstrates knowledge of existing work in the field, and potential contributions to knowledge. It should also explain the proposed research methods and include a plan of the research, and a timeline.

Closing date for applications is 17.00 (UK time) on Friday 14 December 2018. Interviews will be in early January 2019.

Proposed Supervision Team:

The supervisory team may include two of the following academics: Prof Lenny Koh, Dr Andrea Genovese, Dr Sonal Choudhary, Prof David Oglethorpe, Prof Andrew Simpson, Dr Erica Ballantyne, Dr Chantal Cantarelli, Dr Antonino Sgalambro, Dr Mike Simpson, Dr Rob Marchand, Dr Andrew Brint, Prof John Cullen, Prof Jonathan Linton, Dr Stuart Maguire, Prof Elaine Toms, Prof Panos Ketikidis.