Process and Manufacturing Challenge

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P&G’s are a global organisation and have a large footprint in the North-East. Their ‘Newcastle Innovation Centre (NIC) is a R&D site with both science and engineering capability, pilot plant scale detergent facilities.

P&G’s Newcastle Innovation Centre (NIC) has a nice new efficient gas-powered steam generator (~1MW) that produces ~1 to 2 T/d of CO2.  As part of our sustainability journey, we want to reduce our carbon footprint at a site level, while keeping running this capability for the foreseeable future. A ‘carbon capture’ (CC) unit that could be bolted onto the exhaust to remove or simply reduce CO2 emissions would greatly help on this journey.


People current state and future state

Current state

Future state

P&G’s ‘Newcastle Innovation Centre (NIC) is a R&D site with both science and engineering capability, pilot plant scale detergent facilities, and a passion and commitment to a Net Zero future.

Although motivation and stakes are high, the current situation highlighted the need for a regional support and response.

We hope this makes P&G an attractive partner to regional SME’s to find novel, learn and iterative, and ultimately come up with commercially viable solutions to this challenge, that successful SME’s would then be able to scale up and reply across the region.

We hope to be able to develop regional skills and infrastructure to solve real world sustainability challenges in commercially viable ways.

Technology current state and future state

Current state

Future state

Traditional ‘CC’ technologies involve significant footprint and capital investment, making them inhibitive for small applications (R&D facilities, SME’s, office / gov buildings, hotels), with a capability that that may be beyond the needs.

Off-the-shelf solutions  are currently none existent or unscalable to allow companies such as P&G to grow decarbonisation actions throughout manufacturing plants and production lines.

The solution implemented does not require heavy footprint and financial impacts and can be easily replicable throughout small and medium business operations.

An affordable and practical engineering or technological solution allow P&G to maximise lifecycle of gas boilers operations while enabling a smooth transition to Net Zero technologies and the electrification of heating and steam generation.

Finance current state and future state

Current state

Future state

Increasingly, environmental ‘commitments’ are (rightly) being made across the public and private sector, but real-world practical solutions are not always readily available to support the transition.

Although the NIC site is known for its R&D capacities, the implementation of Carbon Capture technologies has remained a hard task considering the financial and footprint impact of such applications on small scales.

P&G is able to meet the environmental commitments across business plants and functions through the implementation of readily available and scalable solutions to support the transition.

A scalable, cost-efficient solution to deliver meaningful reduction in CO2 emissions that can be reapplied to a wide variety of applications, eliminating the need for high removal efficiency.

In scope

  • Engineering solutions
  • Design of hardware
  • Prototype creation

Out of scope

  • Training courses around Net Zero
  • Consultancy
  • Digital Solutions

Manufacturing Challenge

A factory’s first step toward NetZero

We are open to any product or service ideas which:

Will help P&G’s R&D centre take the first steps on their decarbonisation journey by supporting the reduction of carbon emissions from existing gas boilers, through innovative engineering solutions.

Products and services which:

  • Simple, low cost, robust hardware
  • Simple reaction chemistries using readily available commodity chemicals
  • Outlet for reaction products (e.g. sodium carbonate into detergents, glass or water softening?)
  • Measurement of ‘environmental benefit’