Sustainable Venture Development Partners Ltd

**Business need** As the UK's largest manufacturing sector, the food manufacturing industry represents £104bn \[_great.gov.uk,2024_\]. Its supply-chains are fraught with inefficiencies, resulting in significant food waste/CO2e/cost. The industry produces ~1.4m tonnes of food waste yearly \[_WRAP,2023_\], accounting for up to 10% of manufacturers' costs \[...

One of the key non-technical systemic barriers to the delivery of Net Zero objectives is community engagement. A potential solution is the curation of a place-based ecosystem to facilitate: 1 / Innovation, community feedback, and ideation 2 / Local community engagement with current and future climate action initiatives 3 / Catalyse private sector investme...

The project will undertake a feasibility study in the London borough of Lambeth, in partnership with key stakeholders, to accelerate the transition to net zero by testing innovative approaches to unlocking non-technical systemic barriers. Similar Council approaches have focused on modal shifts without a joined-up approach, limiting their impact. In order ...

Of the total UK waste from households, 6.3% is comprised of products thrown away before the end of their useful lives (Statista,2022). Whilst 70% of UK consumers express interest in product-life extension, 54% believe that it should be the responsibility of the retailer to facilitate accessible, circular solutions (Capgemini,2021). An existing retailer-le...

The amount of plastic that is produced in the world every year has increased explosively in just a human lifetime, from 2 million tons in 1950 to 368 million tons in 2019 (Greenpeace, 2022). The UK generates more plastic waste per person than almost any other country in the world, second only to the USA (Law KL et al, 2020). Waste sent for incineration in...

In this project, "Beyond-LPG", newly-founded British startup The First Element Group Ltd ("TFEG") will run a 6 month investigation of the LPG market to explore and assess opportunities to replace LPG with green hydrogen. TFEG will receive support from partner Sustainable Ventures Design, the planet-centred design team at Sustainable Ventures ("SV"). SV De...

BEVscan aims to improve the user experience throughout the secondary EV market by providing the buyer and seller of a used EV with robust data regarding the health of the car battery. The value of second-hand electric vehicles is inherently linked to the battery SoH (State of Health). BEVscan will assess the feasibility of measuring SoH when an electric v...

100 million plastic coat hangers are discarded in the UK each year (Common Objective, 2020). A significant proportion of these are used just once; most notably, those used at the 'garment on hanger' (GOH) stage - when garments are transported on hangers from factories to stores before being discarded for branded front-of-house hangers. Globally, an estima...

Current methods of waste collection have remained largely unchanged for decades, whereby significant inefficiencies exist in the system, creating unnecessary air pollutants and the congestion of busy urban roads. Smart Waste Infrastructure & Forecasting Telematics (SWIFT) seeks to address these issues through the use of sensors and collection route optimi...

The UK will ban all sales of new diesel and petrol cars by 2040 (DEFRA,2017). The adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs) could add c.30GW to UK peak demand by 2050 (National Grid, 2017), requiring significant upgrades to the UK's electricity grid, costing 'tens of billions' (ESC, 2018). This can be reduced to around 8GW with smart charging technologies, incl...

Soil degradation is 'one of the most pressing problems facing humanity' and disproportionately impacts smallholder farmers in developing countries (FAO, 2015). Due to cost and accessibility barriers, these farmers lack access to effective tools to combat this threat. Sireet, a smallholder tea cooperative in Kenya exemplifies this problem - 57% of their fa...

Linked to a global increasing population, is the increasing production, consumption and disposal of plastics. Plastic production has grown from 1.5 million tonnes per annum in 1950 to 359 million tonnes in 2018, yet only 9% of this is recycled (Plastics Europe, 2019). While plastic packaging has revolutionised the way in which we store and consume food, t...