The Environmental Biotechnology Innovation Centre (EBIC) is using the UKCRIC funded National Research Facility for Water and Wastewater Treatment to provide the platform for the design of a new test bed to explore the application of Engineering Biology solutions to wastewater treatment challenges.

The National Research Facility for Water and Wastewater Treatment at Cranfield University provides state-of-the-art facilities for advanced research and development in water and wastewater treatment technologies.

EBIC launched an Early Career Researcher (ECR) challenge with goal to translate scientific research into practical environmental solutions. The aim of the challenge is for each ECR group to produce a set of protocols and a testing facility for use by the EBIC community and beyond. The “winning” facility will be built at Cranfield’s UKCRIC pilot testing facilities and made available to all EBIC team members.

Through this challenge, ECR’s are expected to design a practical, scalable, safe, and regulatory-aware framework for deploying engineering biology in the environment.

Each testing facility be able to:

• operate under continuous flow;
• be agnostic to the reactor being tested;
• ensure safe operation, with no risk of engineered organisms entering the environment.

At a recent workshop the ECR teams were able to present their initial project plans for their testing facility and get advice and feedback from experts within EBIC. A part of this workshop also included a tour of the UKCRIC National Research Facility for Water and Wastewater Treatment at Cranfield University, where the successful ECR project will be built.

The ECR Challenge will run for one year, culminating in the presentation of the final projects at the EBIC ECR Conference - Engineering Biology for Environmental Solutions, 16-17 September 2026, in Southampton.

Professor Frederic Coulon, Director of EBIC, said:

“Engineering biology holds significant promise for environmental biotechnology and advanced environmental applications, yet scaling remains constrained by technical, regulatory, and societal barriers.  The ECR Challenge within the Environmental Biotechnology Innovation Centre empowers early career researchers (ECRs) to question assumptions, identify potential solutions, and raise wider awareness of both opportunities and limitations. In doing so, it helps bridge discovery and innovation with translation, enabling technologies to progress toward scalable deployment while building capability for the next generation of environmental innovation.”

About the Environmental Biotechnology Innovation Centre

The Environmental Biotechnology Innovation Centre (EBIC) is a £13 million national engineering biology hub focused on engineering microbial consortia and synthetic biology systems for pollution mitigation, resource recovery, waste valorisation, and environmental sensing. By bringing together nine UK universities and industrial partners, the programme aims to translate advances in engineering biology into practical biotechnologies that can address real environmental challenges.

EBIC is funded by UK Research and Innovation and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, reflecting the strategic importance of engineering biology as a tool for environmental problem-solving. EBIC also supports innovation pathways, including programmes like the “ECR Challenge”, which help researchers move environmental biotechnology concepts from fundamental research towards deployable applications.