Roland Clift

Roland Clift is a chemical engineer and emeritus professor of environmental technology at the University of Surrey, where he founded the Centre for Environmental Strategy in 1992. He started out in particle technology and later moved into industrial ecology, life-cycle assessment and sustainable energy systems.

Education and career

Clift matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1960. From 1964 to 1967 he worked as a chemical engineer for Imperial Chemical Industries, and in 1967 he joined the staff of McGill University in Montreal. He taught there until 1975, rising from lecturer to associate professor, and spent 1973–74 as a visiting professor at the University of Naples. McGill awarded him a PhD in 1970 for a thesis on bubble interaction in fluidised beds.

After leaving McGill, he lectured in chemical engineering at Imperial College London in 1975–76 and at the University of Cambridge from 1976 to 1981. During his time at Cambridge he was also a fellow of Trinity, from 1978 to 1981.

He moved to Surrey in 1981 as professor of chemical engineering and was head of the Department of Chemical and Process Engineering until 1991. In 1992 he set up the Centre for Environmental Strategy (now the Centre for Environment and Sustainability), with the aim of bringing engineers and social scientists together to work on environmental problems. He was its director until 2005 and held the chair of environmental technology until 2008, when he became emeritus professor. Outside Surrey, he has been a visiting professor in environmental systems analysis at Chalmers University of Technology and an adjunct professor of chemical and biological engineering at the University of British Columbia.

Research

His early research was on particle technology. In the 1980s he led a particle technology group at Surrey whose members included Jonathan Seville, Uğur Tüzün and Mojtaba Ghadiri. The group tried to explain the behaviour of powders from the mechanics of single particles, and developed new methods for characterising and modelling them along the way.

From the early 1990s his work shifted to the environmental effects of products and production systems. A 1993 paper looked at how life-cycle assessment could be used to set criteria for ecolabels, and at practical problems such as defining the "cradle" and "grave" of a product when recycling and disposal practices differ from one European country to another. With L. Wright, he compared the environmental impacts at each stage of a supply chain with the economic value added at that stage.

The environmental scientist Gjalt Huppes has singled out Clift's analysis of material stocks as part of his contribution to industrial ecology. The approach combines life-cycle assessment with material flow analysis and asks what functions the stock of materials serves in society. Huppes also noted his work at the boundary between academic research and politics. With Walter R. Stahel, he has written about the "performance economy", in which companies sell the service a product provides rather than the product itself. They argued that reuse and remanufacturing keep goods in use for longer and cut the amount of material needed to maintain them.

More recent projects have looked at energy recovery from waste, recovery of phosphorus from wastewater, and the effect of electric vehicles on energy systems.

Public policy and professional service

Clift sat on the UK Ecolabelling Board from 1992 to 1998, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution from 1996 to 2005, and the Science Advisory Council of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from 2006 to 2011. In 2004–05 he was specialist adviser to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee for its inquiry into energy efficiency. Between 2012 and 2014 he was a review editor for the industry chapter of Working Group III's contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.

He was president of the International Society for Industrial Ecology in 2009–10 and became its executive director in 2011.

In 2021 he backed a letter from Trinity alumni that called on the college to sell its investments in fossil fuels.

Honours and awards

Clift is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) and the Royal Society of Arts. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1994 New Year Honours for services to science and technology, and was promoted to Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2006 New Year Honours.

The Royal Academy of Engineering gave him its Sir Frank Whittle Medal in 2003 for his leading part in developing life-cycle assessment and in bringing environmental and social issues into it. He shared IChemE's 2007 Hanson Medal, which goes to the best article published in The Chemical Engineer each year.

At the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), he gave the P. V. Danckwerts Memorial Lecture, titled "Chemical Engineering Outside the Pipe: Industrial Ecology and Sustainability". The lecture is sponsored jointly by IChemE, AIChE, the European Federation of Chemical Engineering and the journal Chemical Engineering Science.

The International Society for Industrial Ecology awarded him its Society Prize in 2015. He received IChemE's George E. Davis Medal for 2016, the institution's highest honour. It was presented to him in July 2017, after he gave the 12th George E. Davis Lecture at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London.

Selected publications

• Clift, Roland; Grace, John R.; Weber, Martin E. (1978). Bubbles, Drops, and Particles. Academic Press. ISBN 978-0-12-176950-5.
• Seville, J. P. K.; Tüzün, Uğur; Clift, Roland (1997). Processing of Particulate Solids. Blackie Academic & Professional. doi:10.1007/978-94-009-1459-9. ISBN 978-0-7514-0376-3.
• Azapagic, Adisa; Perdan, Slobodan; Clift, Roland, eds. (2004). Sustainable Development in Practice: Case Studies for Engineers and Scientists. John Wiley & Sons. doi:10.1002/0470014202. ISBN 978-0-470-85608-6.
• Clift, Roland; Druckman, Angela, eds. (2016). Taking Stock of Industrial Ecology. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-20571-7. ISBN 978-3-319-20570-0.

References

External links

• University of Surrey profile