A few months ago, we ran a story about a very exciting new technology which promised to cut the embodied carbon of ceramic tiles by up to 94%. For this issue, we spoke with the founder and CEO of DeKiln, Aled Roberts, who pioneered and developed this technology and is now scaling it with the support of Johnson Tiles. In the following conversation, we discuss the origin and development of DeKiln before diving into its potentially wide-reaching implications for the future of the tiling industry.
Could you provide a brief introduction to you and your research?
I’m Aled Roberts, founder and CEO of DeKiln. My background is in materials chemistry. I completed a PhD at the University of Liverpool before joining the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology as a research scientist, working at the interface of biotechnology and materials engineering. Much of that research involved recreating natural materials in the lab, understanding how nature builds hard, resilient structures like shell and enamel without heat or energy-intensive processing. That biomimicry work became the foundation for DeKiln, where we’ve applied the same principles to reinvent how ceramic tiles are made without relying on a traditional kiln.
How and why did you come up with the idea of DeKiln?
Ceramics have been made the same way for thousands of years – fired in energy-intensive kilns – and that approach is not compatible with a Net Zero future. Because I’d come from materials science rather than the tiles industry, I wasn’t bound by the usual assumptions about how a ceramic product has to be made. I started exploring how naturally durable materials, like pearls, achieve their strength, without heat, which led directly to BioSintering. I’ve always been inspired by people like Thomas Edison and Stephanie Kwolek, who found breakthroughs by pursuing ideas everyone else had written off as impractical.
How long did the process take and how did it evolve throughout?
It’s been a long and far from linear journey. Early on it was extremely resourceful, low-budget experimentation, testing how different waste materials and binders behaved under different curing conditions. Raising our first round of investment and going full-time was a major turning point followed by securing £3 million through the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Green Future Fellowship, which gave us the confidence and resource to develop the technology properly. Each stage pushed the material further from a lab-scale concept towards something genuinely production-ready, culminating in our partnership with Johnson Tiles to take it to industrial scale.
How did Johnson Tiles get involved with the project? What was their involvement throughout the process?
Johnson Tiles came in through Frontier IP, who introduced us and helped put a formal partnership in place. Before working together, we had strong environmental credentials but a limited understanding of what the market actually demands in terms of performance, design and supply chain. Johnson Tiles gave us direct access to that knowledge and it’s genuinely shaped how we’ve developed the technology for a real commercial context. Their involvement has run right through the process from early technical input through to now as we work together on plans for a pilot facility in Stoke-on-Trent.
How do you see it integrating with the broader UK tile industry? Does it have a significant future in retail or commercial projects?
I think kiln-free ceramics have real potential to become part of the industry’s mainstream toolkit, not just a niche sustainability story. High energy prices actually work in our favour since traditional firing is heavily dependent on gas and that gap in competitiveness is only going to widen. Because our raw material is locally sourced waste plaster, there’s also a genuine opportunity to build smaller, more localised production models rather than everything being manufactured overseas. For retail and commercial specification where budgets and carbon targets increasingly go hand in hand, I think the case for switching becomes very compelling, very quickly.
What influence do you hope this product will have on the tiling industry at large?
I’d like it to prompt a broader rethink of what’s actually necessary in ceramic manufacturing rather than simply accepting the kiln as a fixed cost of doing business. If we can demonstrate that a kiln-free process can meet the performance standards the industry expects, that opens the door for others to challenge similarly entrenched assumptions elsewhere in the supply chain. More practically, I hope it helps bring UK tile manufacturing back to life using local waste streams and creating jobs in places like Stoke-on-Trent. Ultimately, success looks like kiln-free ceramics becoming a genuinely normal specification choice and not an exception.
