Asia is the leader in green materials
The city of Singapore as a leading country in materials science: the case for a green transition and a growing number of scientists in the EU
Singapore is a country that has a very high concentration on materials science: among the leading 20 nations, it has the second-highest percentage for materials-science output as a proportion of overall output in Nature Index journals (48.6%). The partnership between the city state and China in the subject of science is the second best in the world, with a bilateral collaboration score (CS) of 400 as the result of 400 Nature Index papers together. Singapore’s contribution to this collaboration was also far from small: it represented around a third of the CS produced by the pair. The National University of Singapore ( ) and Tianjin University, China were the leading international partners in materials science in 2023, with a CS of 43.03. The NUS was also the third highest non-Chinese academic institution for materials science in the world by Share, after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Tokyo
The country is a big spender on research and development (R&D) and has world-leading numbers of researchers relative to its population size, according to statistics from the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO. But with a birthrate that is also the lowest in the world and dwindling numbers of students going into higher education, South Korea has challenges to overcome to remain as a global leader in science.
The importance of the Singapore–China collaboration might reflect the city state’s ongoing engagement with China’s global infrastructure development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Nature index shows Singapore as China’s strongest BRI partner. But country-specific trends in how researchers are identifying themselves on papers might mean high international collaboration scores between China and countries such as Singapore might in part be made up by Chinese researchers working with Chinese researchers.
According to data from a 2021 survey funded by the European Commission — the Mobility Patterns and Career Paths of EU Researchers — researchers and PhD students from Italy move between countries significantly more than the European Union average, to seek better working conditions and pay, and advance their careers abroad. Italy may need to consider talent retention, if it wants to become one of the leading countries in materials science.
There is evidence that Denmark punches above its weight in the field, however: normalizing its Share for population gives it a higher figure per million people than the United States, United Kingdom or Germany. Denmark is a country keen to be a leader of the green transition and new technologies associated with this, often using its natural strengths such as connections to sea-related industries. In 2023, researchers from Aarhus University showed that chemical recycling approaches for thermoset epoxy resins and composites were achievable2. These materials are found in the shells of wind-turbine blades and this new approach could lead to a reduction in the number of wind-turbine blades sent to landfill.
The Nature Index: Tracking and Analyzing Scientific Research Outputs in the Emerging Markets and the Japan-China Correspondence
A description of the terminology and methodology used in this supplement, and a guide to the functionality that is available free online at natureindex.com.
The Nature Index uses Count and Share to track research output. A country/territory or an institution is given a Count of 1 for each article that has at least one author from that country/territory or institution. This means that the same article can contribute to the Count of multiple countries/territories even if there is only one author.
Adjusted Share accounts for the small annual variation in the total number of articles in the Nature Index journals. The percentage difference in the total number of articles in the index in a given year is compared with the number of articles in base year to arrive at Share values.
The score of the two institutions’ cooperation is based on the amount of shares they have in each other. A bilateral collaboration can be between any two institutions or countries/territories co-authoring at least one article in the journals tracked by the Nature Index.
Each query will return a profile page that lists the country or institution’s recent outputs, from which it is possible to drill down for more information. There are two ways to display articles: journal and article. The research outputs are organized in a fashion that explains the topic. The pages list the institution or country’s/territory’s top collaborators, as well as its relationship with other organizations. Users can track an institution’s performance over time, create their own indexes and export table data.
The lead institutions and countries are shown in the tables in the supplement, as well as the leading institutions in each sector based on the same metric. The top rising institutions were included because they changed their Share from the previous year.
There is an acute awareness that economic goals often underpin cross-border relationships and might impact them as emerging technologies mature from fundamental research into serious commercial prospects. Japan’s government, for example, is wary of China’s potential to dominate emerging green industry markets, Domen says. “China is our very good collaborator and our very good competitor.”
Over the course of his career, Domen’s photocatalytic materials research in Japan has changed. There were only four photocatalysis research groups in Japan when he was a graduate. “Now there are about 20, collaborating but also competing.”
Planning is under way for a next-generation system, using a higher performance catalyst, that will be demonstrated on a 3,000 m2 array. Now in its second phase, the project is increasingly funded by industry collaborations.
In 2010, Domen was granted 10 years of funding to pursue his strategically significant research, an unprecedented length of grant for Japan. He says this made a huge difference compared with the usual five-year projects “because we could form long-term collaborations, including with industry, to make important progress”. At the project start, the team had initially planned a 1 m2 solar green hydrogen demonstration system, but in 2021, Domen and his industrial partners demonstrated a 100 m2 array of photocatalytic water-splitting reactors for green hydrogen production4.
Scaling Up the Growth of Microalgae to Support Sustainable Biomanufacturing in Singapore: A Case Study with a Microphotonic Film
“Singapore is very special in that it concurrently collaborates with the East and the West, which is unusual with today’s geopolitics,” Liu says. “We can form collaborations with the best partners, to complement our own strengths.”
The government also nurtures collaboration with leading researchers from other countries. The Campus for Research excellence and technological enterprise is one such initiative. “We invite researchers from very good foreign universities to come to Singapore to work with us, to co-develop our research areas and materials,” says Liu. The University of Cambridge, UK, is one of 11 institutions that received funds in the latest CREATE initiative, focused on decarbonization.
“Once the cost of green methanol is comparable with petrochemical methanol, the world will embrace this renewable energy,” Liu says. The analysis showed that the cost of green methanol was derived from harvesting hydrogen from water. “In response, we raised funds to build a national Centre for Hydrogen Innovation with a focus on how to reduce hydrogen cost,” she says. Funding was led by a S$15-million (US$11.1-million) endowment gift from the state-owned investment company, Temasek.
Organic photocatalytic materials are found in the lab that can absorb the sun’s energy and drive chemical reactions. The team used these materials to make a group of chemicals that could be used as fuel sources, such as green methanol.
Harnessing light to drive the conversion of CO2 into valuable products is also a hot topic in Singapore, where the government prioritizes sustainable-materials research, although for different reasons than the region’s major manufacturing economies.
The film is for sustainable biomanufacturing. “We also want to tailor the solar spectrum for the fast growth of microalgae,” Yin says. The idea is to use microalgae to turn carbon dioxide emissions into valuable products, because the microalgae absorb CO2 as they grow, becoming rich in proteins and oils that can be harvested. The team is targeting high value applications. The higher we scale up, the less production costs and the broader range of products we could consider.
By tuning the solar spectrum in this way2, the microphotonic film, which Yin first worked on with colleagues while in the United States, boosted the growth of lettuces by more than 20%. The same gains were seen for plants grown under lights. Yin explains that the main energy cost for vegetable factories is lighting. We could contribute in that area.
Source: Why Asia is leading the field in green materials
Making Green Materials in a Warming Climate: An Experimental Investigation of a Roof-Top Cooling Project on a China Glacier No. 1
Some Asian countries do very well in investing funding into the phase of research called the translational phase, where ideas are more connected with industry. “It’s a win–win situation because in return, industry partners offer more financial support for fundamental research.”
Zhu, who spent almost a decade studying and working in the United States — at Stanford University in California and the University of California, Berkeley — before joining Nanjing University in 2013, also points to the existing evidence that environmental challenges can be met through technology. When he returned to China, for instance, atmospheric pollution in cities was rife. “It was very clear how industrialization was impacting the wider environment,” he says. Encouraging electric-vehicle take up is one of the government measures that has made a difference.
Materials scientist Xiaobo Yin, who is based at the University of Hong Kong, believes that cooling objects with radiative cooling could be used to combat rising urban heat. Air conditioning cooks the inside of the house while consuming energy which adds more heat to the environment. “Buildings or roads capable of radiative cooling are the only way we can expel the excess heat out of the Earth.”
Buying an ice cream in a hot day can be difficult because it can be a matter of seconds before the most hardiest product gets to soup. An experiment by a team of researchers in China provides some hope for those with such time-management issues. After being placed in the sun, the ice cream had a cooling effect, and it remained intact for 80 minutes.
Much of the green-materials work is dominated by research on next-generation batteries and solar cells, but numerous other technologies are under investigation, often with a focus on materials designed to interact with sunlight in unusual and potentially useful ways.
The experiment had something to do with it. According to Jia Zhu, a materials-science researcher at Nanjing University who led the work, it showed that such materials have huge potential in a warming climate. When an 80 m2 sheet of the same material was laid on the surface of China’s Tianshan Glacier No. 1 in Xinjiang, the covered section was about 70 cm higher after 20 days. Similar materials on rooftops have been used by other researchers to cool buildings.
