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Department of Chemistry
Abstract network molecules

EPSRC Prosperity Partnerships Award for Chemistry's Professor Wilson and the ANTENNA project team.

22 July 2021
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The £1.9 million funding boost for the ANTENNA partnership investigating sustainable cleaning products was awarded to Chemistry's Professor Mark Wilson, Professor Colin Bain, Professor Andy Beeby, Dr Clare Mahon and Dr Richard Thompson in collaboration with Durham's Centre for Soft Matter, colleagues from Imperial College London and Procter & Gamble (P&G).

A partnership which hopes to help re-invent everyday cleaning products to meet the world’s sustainability challenges has been awarded £1.9m from the UK Government.

The project, which will run for four-and-a-half years, hopes to develop new tools that could transform the design of cleaning products to help make them more environmentally friendly.

Net Zero

The team is made up of scientists from our Department of Chemistry with colleagues at Imperial College London and Procter & Gamble (P&G) and is part of a long-term commitment to joint working between the three organisations.

The goal is to help the UK achieve Net Zero by 2050 and meet the complex global challenges of water scarcity, energy consumption and decarbonisation.

The team will use their expert understanding of the science and engineering behind household cleaning products to create experimental and theoretical tools that can unlock new formulations. The aim will be for the products to enable consumers to use less water and energy whilst still achieving excellent results.

Working together

The funding for the ANTENNA partnership has come from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Prosperity Partnerships fund.

Both universities are already ‘global strategic partners’ of P&G with over a decade of collaboration and more than 100 projects to date.

The project is the latest example of ground-breaking collaboration between academia and industry in the North East.

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