Knowledge Exchange Placements

This placement strengthens circular‑economy research links between the University of Exeter and Vietnam’s Environment for Development Centre. It will co-design a citizen-science platform that enables Mekong Delta farmers to integrate local knowledge into scientific models, yielding tailored climate-adaptation advice that improves productivity, sustainability, and resilience.

During the visit, the PI and Vietnamese colleagues will refine research questions, methods and funding strategy, and conduct exploratory interviews and ethnographic observations with 20 farmers to ensure the platform’s usability and relevance. Outcomes include a pilot dataset, a publication plan, and a strengthened international partnership, advancing the literature on citizen science, circular economy, and tech-enabled climate adaptation in agri-entrepreneurship.

The UK economy continues to face challenges from unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, with limited tools available to help consumers understand and reduce their environmental impact. This placement will explore how digital storytelling and product data can help consumers value and extend the life of everyday items.

By working with industry partners, we will test new ways to share product histories and create mock-ups of a digital platform concept. The outcomes will provide insights for businesses and consumers, while contributing practical knowledge and innovation to support the transition to a circular economy

The transition to a circular economy requires businesses to operationalise and create value in new ways along entire product life cycles. Batteries are central to electrification and decarbonisation, demanding stewardship across all stages to maximise value and recover materials.

This project explores the business case for battery traceability through digital product passports. It investigates how traceability can create strategic and financial value beyond compliance, enabling second-life applications and new circular business models. The study also addresses resource resilience, economic viability, and policy design for critical materials and digitally enabled circular supply chains.

When household items are advertised on the digital gifting platform Freegle, knowing how desirable they are to different user groups at the time of advertising would enable strategic promotion to the most relevant users, improving the likelihood of an item being repurposed. Recent advances in machine

learning enables this task using the text description and the images of the items. The predicted desirability can be validated against the number of users expressing interest within a certain amount of time. This project is expected to optimise the group of targeted users, increase the likelihood of success, and improve user satisfaction.

The Digital Product Passport (DPP) represents a significant advance in product transparency, traceability and sustainability. With current EU regulations on DPP implementation, the UK is considering adopting a similar system. However, there is limited evidence to quantify the benefits of DPPs in the medical technology (MedTech) sector, where the supply chain involves multiple stakeholders without a unified system to track materials, maintenance or repair history, thus creating a barrier to circularity.

This barrier could be reduced by using DPPs. This placement, working in partnership with AMRC, aims at cross-sector learning and interdisciplinary collaboration by transferring knowledge from a well-developed DPP project for electric batteries in the automotive sector to inform DPP requirements for the MedTech sector.

This placement investigates sustainable semiconductor device technologies for future Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) systems through coordinated academic–industrial knowledge exchange. Two visits to the Centre for Integrative Semiconductor Materials (CISM) group, Swansea University, will examine material

platforms, device architectures, and fabrication routes that enable high efficiency, long lifetime, and radiation-tolerant operation. Another visit to an industrial manufacturer in France will map SBSP performance requirements onto existing capabilities and identify opportunities for collaboration.