This has raised the importance of modern slavery within the construction supply chain, bribery, labour and workers’ rights, and sustainable development via an impactful white paper published with BRE. APRES complemented a sustained outreach programme (CORE: Creative Outreach for Resource Efficiency, EPSRC, £302k), which raised important questions about how construction uses natural resources. In the AESOP study (£124k, EPSRC/IAA), a ground-breaking Manifesto and Design Guide for ethical sourcing was developed.

Developed a mobile app to record worker activities that generate social value, which later helped us to win one of the five national Scape Procure frameworks for Local Authority capital works; rolling it out over 450 major capital projects in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to capture £27.8m of social return to date in an ongoing capital spend of £2.25bn by May 2021.

Embedded social value principles within consulting practice, identifying barriers and enablers to generating such impact and sharing insights with Social Value UK.

Developed and implemented a novel approach to increase the participation and career advancement of women researchers. It is publicly available and has been adopted by institutions in Austria, Italy, France, Germany, Serbia, Spain and the UK to author and implement Gender Action Plans.

Funded by Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH), this project worked on realising transformational health and safety during the initial phases of the Tideway project in London.

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Tackling the £850m of occupational ill-health costs experienced by construction each year, our work with a not-for-profit organisation, B&CE, investigated the implications of health hazards such as noise and dust on construction sites, particularly focusing on SMEs operating in such environments.

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We investigated the impact of COVID-19 on construction, to understand how the changes to construction site management implemented as a result of COVID-19 restrictions such as social distancing have impacted Occupational Health and whether any beneficial measures might be able to be applied long-term.

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Professor Chris Goodier leads a new £630,000 project for NHS England regarding the repair, maintenance, monitoring and potential demolition of NHS estate buildings made with a specialised form of precast panellised construction, RAAC (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete).

The project aims to generate new unique data, knowledge and understanding of RAAC and how it performs as a material and structurally, to help enable NHS building owners to make appropriate, timely and safe decisions regards their building stock. Research techniques include big data analysis, machine learning, finite element modelling, risk analysis and specialised risk analysis tool and mobile app.

Our group has also engaged in a sustained programme of engagement with the NHS to help improve healthcare estate performance, and to strategically approach the NHS estate’s whole life management.

The UKRI Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Centre for Mineral-based Construction Materials (ICEC-MCM) seeks to provide national and global leadership in research to support the transition to a sustainable Circular Economy in the built environment.

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Professor Mohamed Osmani is a partner of the ICEBERG project, in which we are involved in all work packages. We are leading the development and validation of advanced technologies for the purification and processing of gypsum waste from end-of-life plasterboards and synthetic gypsum. We are working closely with British Gypsum, part of the Saint-Gobain group (the UK’s leading manufacturer of plasterboard), and ENVA (a leading plasterboard recycler in the UK and Ireland).

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Embedding sustainability and circular economy in building and infrastructure projects. C-SERVEES was funded by Horizon2020 with £391k, which aims to boost a resource-efficient circular economy in the electrical and electronic (E&E) sector through the development, testing, validation and transfer of new circular economic business models (CEBMs) based on systemic eco-innovative services.

This work has informed the BS 8895 series and related British Standards. It has also been incorporated in the Resources and Waste Strategy for England for further development jointly with industry, DEFRA and BEIS.

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