Accelerating Circularity: Inside the DICE Network’s EPSRC-Funded First Year of Digital innovation
Just over a year into our three-year mission, the DICE Network recently got together with its nine core EPSRC-funded projects to share ground breaking updates on how digital technology is accelerating the UK’s transition to a circular economy. Led by Professor Fiona Charnley, the network is now a thriving community of over 300 partners with several publications and curated events, focusing on embedding sustainability into digital technologies and enabling circularity across sectors.
The meeting highlighted significant progress for the different projects, some of which are mentioned below.
Robotics and Material Intelligence
The RoboTriage project is developing a generic circularity robotic system triage process after engaging with over 30 companies to rapidly assess used products, moving beyond manual sorting to recommend the highest-value circular routes. Circular Robot 5.0 integrated digital passports to create tamper-proof logs of robot sensor data through a federated computing model and developing a physical demonstrator at the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC). Meanwhile, the PLASTIC project has achieved nearly 99% accuracy in polymer identification using AI and spectral imaging, with the ambitious goal of reaching 70% recycled content in manufacturing. If this was not enough, they helped launch the Sustainable Engineering Plastics Hub in October 2025
Sustainable Infrastructure and Life Extension
Other projects are looking to reduce the environmental footprint of our digital economy, like IDEAL, who are tackling hardware footprint by using machine learning to detect early signs of failure in IoT devices, extending their lifespans through binary patching, resilient architectures and viable business models cascading into other digital applications. Addressing the massive energy demands of the AI era, the HPC project is drafting a major white paper to provide a long-term strategy for a sustainable high-performance computing sector in the UK. Also, researching hardware and software co-design, specifically for wind farm optimisation, creating a circular story where HPC optimises the energy that powers
Social and Sector-Specific Impact
The DICE network’s reach extends to critical sectors that underpin the daily foundations of the UK economy. Within the healthcare sector, the DECHI project is identifying circularity opportunities by quantifying the £10 billion in medical technology imported to the UK annually. The team is leveraging sensorisation and digital product passports to track and optimise the flow of critical devices, such as surgical instruments, enabling circular business models. In relation to UK food systems, DECIDE has been developing a digital hub to redistribute surplus apples, hosting a community of practice for farmers, and even trailing apple pomace (a cider byproduct) as local livestock feed. The Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) project has been busy identifying computational waste (the inefficient or unnecessary use of computing resources, such as processing power, memory, and energy), developing a carbon accounting model for DRI, and using unique creative approaches to portray the concept of digital sufficiency and communicate the complex environmental impacts of data centres.
Looking ahead, the DICE network is preparing for its annual event on June 30th and continues to offer flexible funding for feasibility studies and knowledge exchange. Stay tuned for the next projects update!
The nine EPSRC-funded projects are:
Project Title |
Principal Investigator (PI) |
Host org |
DECHI: Digitally Enabled Circular Healthcare Innovation |
Fiona Charnley |
University of Exeter |
RoboTriage: Robotic Triage for Value Retention in a Circular Economy |
Yongjing Wang |
University of Birmingham |
PLASTIC: Plastics Analysis, Sorting & Recycling Technology through Intelligent Classification |
Stuart Coles |
University of Warwick |
IDEAL: Reducing Carbon Footprints of IoT Devices through Extension of Active Lifespans |
Klaus McDonald-Maier |
University of Essex |
DECIDE: Co-creating equitable circular food systems through a digital Hub: Digital Equitable CIrcular FooD systEms |
Lucy McCarthy & Anne Touboulic |
University of Bristol & University of Nottingham |
SUMER: Digitally enabled sustainable metals recycling for circular economies |
Panagiota Angeli |
University College London |
Reimagining digital research infrastructure in environmental science for a sustainable future |
Kelly Widdicks |
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology |
Circular Robot 5.0: Industry-Wide Data-Driven Circular Economy of Industrial Robots |
Sina Sareh |
Royal College of Art |
Towards a more sustainable High Performance Computing (HPC) sector: a hardware/software co-design proof-of-concept |
Sylvain Laizet |
Imperial College London |