CASE Partnership with Keele University

From a chance meeting at a soil science conference a few months ago, we are excited to announce that 4R Group now have a CASE partnership with Dr. Ian Oliver at Keele University looking at the effects of utility sludge applications on agricultural land.

The PhD project is funded under the National Productivity Investment Fund budget through the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) CASE studentship scheme. Collaboration between industry and academia is highly valuable to both partners, and will allow us to develop hypothesis-driven scientifically-robust research that is both applied and relevant to our commercial contracts recovering wastes to land.

Research will be carried out by PhD student Tomi Turner, who was appointed in December last year. Tomi will initially focus on the applications of alum and ferric clean water treatment sludge on grassland and arable rotations, investigating impacts on soil invertebrates and microbial respiration.

We are very excited to see what our partnership brings to industry in terms of knowledge transfer and we look forward to hosting Tomi on his work experience placements in the coming months.

Regular project updates will be posted here so please watch this space!