Contracts for Innovation: Resource Efficient Chemicals Impacts

To lead a project, you can:

• be an organisation of any size, including those based in the EU, EEA or internationally
• work alone or with the subcontracted skills and expertise of others from business, research organisations, research and technology organisations, or the third sector (charities, social enterprises and voluntary groups)

Contracts will be awarded to a single legal entity only. The majority of the project work and key deliverables must be completed by the applicant and be carried out in the UK. Subcontractors can be used, but only for specialist skills.

If your own organisation does not have operations in the relevant sector, we expect you to include an integration supporter in your project to help facilitate the impact validation of your solution.

Demonstrations should be in a suitable industrial environment within the UK to enable the effective validation of the solution’s viability and impacts. We also welcome applications for solutions which have been demonstrated in a relevant sector in the UK within the last five years, but which have not yet reached commercial maturity and require further impact validation.

Your project could involve, for example:

• a manufacturer within the chosen sector, for example, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 suppliers, raw material producers
• recovery businesses, for example, demolition companies, scrap processors, re-use and recycling facilities
• remanufacturing and repair businesses
• organisations that have the potential to become a customer
• specialists in impact validation, for example, in Life Cycle Analysis

We recommend approaching potential integration supporters as early as possible during the application process or early stages of your project. This ensures your industry relationships are well established before delivering the project demonstration. We welcome projects that include innovative startups.

If your project is successful, we reserve the right to request letters of support from organisations named in your application.

Projects must:

• start no sooner than 1 November 2025
• end by 31 March 2026
• last between three and five months
• have total costs of between £50,000 and £300,000, inclusive of VAT; we expect the majority of projects to have costs less than £100,000

Demonstrations should be in a suitable industrial environment within the UK to enable the effective validation of the solution’s viability and impacts.

Projects can be 100% funded, as Contracts for Innovation competitions involve procurement of R&D services at a fair market value and are not subject to subsidy control criteria that typically apply to grant funding.

The aim of this competition is to build on the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) Unlocking Resource Efficiency research by supporting organisations to deliver an impact validation report for a resource efficiency solution.

This should be informed by a demonstration, which may be carried out as part of the project or otherwise conducted within the last five years.

The innovative resource efficiency solutions should address themes in one of the following strands:

• Resource Efficient Construction Impacts
• Resource Efficient Chemicals Impacts
• Resource Efficient Automotive Impacts

You must select a single strand to apply for. If a project covers multiple strands, choose the one in which the majority of the work will be undertaken.

Innovate UK and DESNZ are collaborating with the chemicals, construction and automotive sectors to accelerate and increase the adoption of innovative resource efficient technologies, low carbon materials and circular business models. This is supporting the government’s commitment to transition the UK to a Net Zero, circular economy.

This competition will focus on the impact validation of resource efficiency solutions. This competition will support the development and delivery of high maturity demonstrations, and the validation of demonstrators from recent (within the last five years) research and development projects.

This competition will:

• enable efficient integration of technologies into targeted industrial sectors
• support innovative suppliers for market readiness
• provide more granular evidence on the potential impact of resource efficiency solutions to help meet the UK’s territorial carbon budget targets

As a minimum, proposals into this competition must relate to solutions at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 5 or higher. If you have validated your solution at TRL5 (in a relevant environment) your project should be to validate up to TRL7 (in an operational environment) and gather operational data to develop a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA).

If you have already validated at TRL7, your project should be to gather operational data to develop an LCA.

In both cases, the solution should still be a prototype or custom built system, not a full commercial version. You must show evidence of this, the testing and validation previously undertaken as part of your application and identify the TRL that you expect to be at start and end of the project.

We encourage you to focus on innovative solutions within the chemicals value chain, including tier 1, 2 and 3 chemicals (see Fig 1). Solutions should improve the resource efficiency of the sector and reduce life cycle emissions. Solutions must fall within one or more of the following themes:

1) Industrial symbiosis: uses for industrial by-products, including materials that would otherwise go to waste or be downgraded to lower value uses, but excluding heat and energy

2) Redesign of chemical formulations and products to reduce emissions and improve circularity, such as:

• reductions in resource intensity of chemical formulations for a given product, or products
• production efficiencies to reduce material waste and improve yield rates when using defossilised chemical feedstocks
• transitions to circular business models including ‘chemicals as a service’ or ‘chemical leasing’ approaches

3) Defossilisation: replacement of virgin fossil-based organic feedstocks with captured CO2, particularly where:

• the CO2 may be derived from sustainable bioenergy, direct air capture or other point sources; impact validation should include these activities
• any hydrogen feedstock used is not fossil derived

4) Defossilisation: replacement of virgin fossil-based organic feedstocks with sustainable biomass.

5) Defossilisation: replacement of virgin fossil based organic feedstocks through chemical plastic recycling, or other valorisation routes for waste streams

Solutions in the defossilisation themes could include:

• development of new tier 2 and 3 chemical synthesis routes that do not rely on fossil-derived based chemicals
• development of chemical formulations that do not rely on the traditional petrochemical value chain and support the creation of high value consumer products
• repurposing and retrofitting of existing process equipment built for fossil-based feedstocks
• repurposing and retrofitting of feedstock supply chains built for fossil-based feedstocks
• improvements in feedstock quality
• feedstock distribution and logistics

You are encouraged to identify how your solution builds on the existing research and innovation landscape, for example, referencing:

• the Unlocking Resource Efficiency research
• NICER Circular Chemical Economy Centre insights
• the Sustainable Chemicals and Materials Manufacturing Hub (SCHEMA Hub) insights
• the Innovation Action Plan to Transform Industrial Waste Gases to Chemicals by the Circular Economy Innovation Network

You must demonstrate a credible and practical route to market, so your application must include an assessment of the commercial viability of your solution and a plan to commercialise your results. The specification report provides details of the commercial assessment that you must undertake as part of this project, and an initial assessment is required as part of your application.

A key project deliverable, that must be included in your milestones, is a demonstration of the solution. The further validation of demonstrations and trials from recent research and development projects is also in scope, provided these meet the eligibility requirements for this competition. Costs for retrospective work cannot be claimed, only new analysis to validate the potential impact of the demonstrated technology.

The demonstration must take place in an environment representative of where the solution will be deployed, allowing for effective evaluation. As part of your project milestones, you are encouraged to invite stakeholders from your target sector to a demonstration event. The demonstration must take place in a setting where potential customers and industry representatives can witness the solution as a compelling business proposition.

If your own organisation does not have operations in the relevant sector, we expect you to include an integration supporter, for example, a trusted sector representative in your project to help facilitate the demonstration and trialling of your solution. In their role as potential future customers, they will be well placed to propose an appropriately representative environment.

You will be expected to collaborate with your integration supporter to achieve this, securing all necessary permissions and approvals.

Example environments include:

• within a manufacturing process
• within a recovery or recycling facility
• within a remanufacturing, re-use or repair facility
• in an end-use site, such as a construction project
• within a customer facing environment, such as retail

This list is not exhaustive, and other environments may be more appropriate to demonstrate certain types of solutions.

You should de-risk all aspects of your project before submitting a bid to this competition, ensuring it can be delivered in line with the requirements of DESNZ and Innovate UK.

For applications in this Resource Efficient Chemicals Impacts strand, your project can focus on one main theme:

• industrial symbiosis in the chemicals sector
• redesign of chemical formulations and products
• defossilisation: captured CO2
• defossilisation: sustainable biomass
• defossilisation: chemical or mechanical plastic recycling, or other valorisation routes for waste streams

You must focus on one main theme but your project may cross over into other themes. This can be explained in further detail in Question 6 in the application questions section.

An online briefing event will be held on Wednesday 16 July, 10am-11.30am: click here to register for a place. A briefing recording and slides will be available.

If you would like to find a subcontractor or integration supporter, contact Innovate UK Business Connect’s Materials, Chemistry, or Sustainability teams.