FEATURE: Six British companies working to cut carbon emissions

This month, six British companies have been granted £120,000 of funding from the Shell Springboard regional awards – announced in Aberdeen last week, and in Cambridge last night.

In May, all six will progress to the final where they will compete for the overall prize of £150,000. Here, we take a look at their fascinating ideas, and how they could help make a low-carbon future a reality.

LightFi

Companies spend a lot of money making sure their offices have the right conditions for their workers – whether that’s lighting or air conditioning. But what if no one is in those rooms? Leaving the lights on might not cost much at a household level, but it all adds up to more electricity being consumed, and more carbon going into the atmosphere. LightFi has a solution. Its technology uses wi-fi radio signals and smart algorithms to detect occupancy in any room, and then automates lights so that they turn off when the space is empty. It’s an easier-to-install alternative to the motion sensors that are commonly used, and also provides data on how a particular space is being used.

Carbogenics

Each year, the UK throws away 2.5 billion disposable coffee cups – and because of their plastic coating, they’re difficult to recycle. Most are burned or thrown into landfill sites, creating thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide. But Edinburgh-based start-up Carbogenics has used them to create a new material. CreChar is a black, granular substance made from paper cups and other low-value paper waste. It’s carbon rich and highly porous, and has been specifically designed to stimulate biological activity. The company says it can be used to enhance biogas production and improve plant growth.

Endo Enterprises

Anyone who has spent a chilly Sunday bleeding their radiators will know that water isn’t always the best solution for evenly distributing heat. Endo Enterprises has developed a liquid called EndoTherm that might do a better job – when added to a wet central heating system, it reduces the surface tension of the circulating water by 60%, improving the efficiency at which it can heat up a room.

Seawater Greenhouse

Demand for food is rising with our planet’s growing population, but our ability to produce it is under threat, particularly in Africa where climate change and desertification are leading to rapidly declining amounts of water for agriculture and arable land for crops. Existing irrigation practices make the problem worse – too much groundwater is extracted, speeding up the process of desertification. It’s a vicious cycle – as areas lose plant coverage, their ability to pull carbon from the air is reduced as well.

London-based firm Seawater Greenhouse believes it has a solution. It has developed ‘cool houses’ that evaporate seawater to create a cool and humid microclimate for growing crops, reducing the demand for fresh water for farming by up to 90%. By using solar power to desalinate seawater, it’s hoped that this technology will enable high-yield agriculture even in times of drought. It could even open up vast areas of previously unsuitable land.

Brill Power

Although renewables will go a long way towards cutting carbon emissions, they’re not entirely carbon free. If we’re moving to a world where energy is stored in lithium-ion batteries, then we need to find some way of making them produce fewer emissions too. Currently, it takes 454 watt-hours of energy to make one watt-hour of storage, which means a lithium-ion battery must be used 450 times to ‘break even’. Oxford-based Brill Power hopes to change that. It is developing battery management technology to increase the lifetime of batteries for grid-scale energy storage and electric vehicles. The company claims its solution can extend the lifetime of batteries by 60%, and expects to offset 2.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2022.

Cambond

Even if we stop using fossil fuels to power our cars and homes, there’s still a big plastic elephant in the room. The plastics industry has become an indispensable part of modern life, but it is based on oil, and generates millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide. Cambridge-based Cambond is trying to find environmentally friendly alternatives to plastic. It has developed Camposite, a plant-based resin made from biomass fibres and polymers. It’s low-carbon and sustainable and could be used to replace plastic in many manufacturing processes.