LIFFE: Light Induced Fluorescence For the Environment

Two large elements of improving the UK's sustainability and drive towards net zero are energy use and waste reduction. A challenge seen throughout multiple industries returning to work after lockdown has been a dramatic loss in productivity and increased waste production resulting from increased cleaning regimes and PPE use. Currently, these are tolerated as necessary steps, but these are not environmentally sustainable long-term, especially for an economy pushing for clean growth.

An ability to 'see' the current virus, Covid-19 and future zoonotic viruses in workplaces would enable industries to continue to operate safely during pandemics, reducing the severity of lockdowns, remove unnecessary cleaning, resulting in productivity gains, reduce energy wastage and chemical usage, plus allow targeted use for new, energy-hungry decontamination methods (deep-UV). This ability would also improve the sustainability of PPE, seen as a necessity in the NHS. The NHS produces a huge amount of waste, which is not able to be re-used or recycled and instead contributes to airborne pollution through incineration or watercourse/table pollution through landfills. If PPE could be re-employed then this would save scarce resources, both energy, and materials, reduce plastic waste and not lead to the acute shortages experienced during the first pandemic wave. Critical to this is the lack of any instantaneous means to determine if biological contamination has taken place and whether it is still present after cleaning is performed such as via deep-UV irradiation to destroy the virus nucleic acid. There is no currently acceptable method of quality control of cleaning reusable PPE. The ability to 'see' dangerous contamination would thus be an enabling technology.
Similarly, armed with a handheld device, cleaning staff could also employ such imaging systems to inspect sources of contamination which are well-known such as sluices where such infections can linger, and complete adequate targeted disinfection.

LIFFE is a feasibility project to examine the potential of spectral fluorescence to be employed to detect biological material within an indoor environment, specifically on PPE visors, hospital consumables and, ultimately, in airborne droplets. Furthermore, LIFFE will examine the feasibility of detection specificity for Covid-19, ultimately to be deployed as part of a hand-held detection system.