Geovation Challenge How can we help British business improve environmental performance?

The Wasted Energy Network is a platform for encouraging inter-business recycling, triggering waste based economies and identifying areas of opportunity for sustainable waste management and energy generation systems. It will be the first mapping system to display, and make connections between, business waste production and the resultant potential for localised energy generation. Today garbage generation and disposal ...more »

We want to create an online service enabling businesses to recycle waste far more effectively.

The idea is to bring waste producers and processors together using a centralised trading platform that will facilitate collaboration and therefore reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill.

http://recyclelink.co.uk

Staff travel is normally the largest CO2 contributor in a business. The aim is to help employers see exactly where their staff travel from so they can introduce more sustainable travel options. We want to build on the success of the myPTP Geovation project. myPTP collects data on staff travel patterns including journey routes and times. We would like to develop a tool to produce heat maps on online OS maps ...more »

Our project aims to facilitate a peer to peer network to provide potential agriculturists with the information, support and practical opportunities they need to get started. The problem - Over 50% of farmers are nearing retirement, and too few of the younger generation are currently on track to enter agriculture related professions. The art of growing produce has not been learnt by many due in part to the increasing ...more »

THE BIG PROBLEM Do you know how much carbon you emit getting to work or moving around normally? No? Most people haven’t got a clue…. Averaged out each commuter emits 3.5Kg of CO2 a day – (that’s the weight of a new born baby in carbon). Astonishing. The solution: we should all be far more aware of our emissions from travel. THE BUSINESS HEADACHE With 80+% of businesses having 50% of their total CO2 footprint tied ...more »

Imagine what businesses could do to encourage bee populations or to prevent ash tree die back. This interactive web-based tool will identify simple actions businesses can take that improve biodiversity in their area, such as identifying rare species on site or adding bird boxes, etc. The tool could highlight actions taken by business users, and even rank their efforts. It will also encourage working with local wildlife ...more »

Recent research commissioned by the City of London shows that 63% of Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) buy from other firms within the City and 68% sold to other firms in the City, highlighting the importance of those local trade relationships. But the majority (70%) of those firms who purchase within the City spend less than a quarter of their total purchasing budget in the City. More can be done to encourage greater ...more »

Sometimes people want to do good but don't know where to start. See, Say, Save enables staff to take photos/video of problems and ask for ideas from across the local community to help reduce, reuse or recycle

Cleanly separated recyclable materials without any contaminants are greatly sought after by reprocessing and manufacturing companies. Waste which has been carefully separated helps them significantly to reduce their costs, makes recycling economically viable, and is of course good for the environment. However, it is absolutely crucial that the waste materials they receive have no contaminates, otherwise it is of little ...more »

My idea is to use OS mapping technology and straight forward soil sampling techniques to create a carbon map of the United Kingdom’s agricultural soils. I will then use this data as the basis for a carbon offset trading scheme that will create new revenues for farmers, encourage the growth of composting and enable companies across the UK to offset their carbon emissions. The potential is enormous as a 1% rise in soil ...more »

Fly tipping is such a huge problem in the UK. Over one billion pounds is spent on it every year. There are not costs spend on health issues caused by trash included. People do not realize how huge it is. Thats why we want to localize all illegal dumps over the UK and showcase the problem If you are on the walk in the forest or in the street and find fly tipping (illegal dumping) it is quite difficult to localize and ...more »

Streetkleen Bio Project is a practical, innovative solution based around the anaerobic digestion of dog waste to create usable energy (methane) . It will provide the impetus to demonstrate why we should divert dog waste from landfill and transform it into usable energy(methane). Dog fouling has the most negative impact across Neighbourhood Management areas in the UK. Local Authorities despite their best efforts have ...more »

WEEE regulation does not go far enough. We propose a scheme that calls together a coalition of manufacturers to retrieve more value from the products they create by recovering them, disassembling and sorting them into the material components and passing them onto someone who can reprocess the parts. Starting with Kyocera (http://www.kyocera.co.uk/) the project aims for an industry-wide reduction in the environmental impact ...more »

Consumers are becoming more environmentally conscious and business’s environmental performance is a key influencing factor regarding the purchase of its products or services. Novel visualisation of environmental impact indicators such as energy usage overlaid onto OS Maps will surface this type of information, allowing consumers to view in a spatial context, the ‘environmental performance’ of businesses. Beyond the ...more »

This project will increase the uptake of renewable energy technologies (solar PV, ground-source heat, air-source heat, small wind turbine etc.) on community halls by providing a web based mechanism for management committees to locate and engage with other hall committees locally and nationally who have successfully installed and run renewable energy installations. Interaction with other hall committees has been shown ...more »