The 2024 winners of the RELX Environmental Challenge, which supports innovative solutions to advance SDG 6 Clean water and sanitation, have been announced.
Since 2011, the RELX Environmental Challenge has been awarded to projects that best demonstrate how they can provide sustainable access to safe water or sanitation. A $50,000 prize is granted to the first place entry and a $25,000 prize for the second place entry. The winners also receive free access for one year to ScienceDirect, RELX’s Scientific, Technical & Medical business’ database of full text, scientific information. Projects must have clear practical applicability, address identified need and advance related issues such as health, education, or human rights. Read more about the RELX Environmental Challenge.
The $50,000 first prize winner is LivingWater Systems, a portable, rainwater harvesting system designed to support its own weight without being physically attached to its host housing unit, therefore making it suitable for use on any home with a pitched roof, including refugee tents and less durable informal structures. LivingWater Systems’ simple and versatile guttering units preserve a renewable supply of clean water by leveraging the surface area of the user’s home. It takes a single individual no more than 20 minutes to set up and the low-cost, portable gutters are ideal for disaster relief situations as well as in off-grid settings for supplementing essential household needs like drinking, bathing, and irrigating plants.
'LivingWaters Systems is honored and thrilled to be chosen as the winner of this year's RELX Environmental Challenge. The support we are privileged with from RELX will enable us to expand our manufacturing capabilities to deliver more portable rain catchment systems to a greater number of off-grid settlements, moving us closer to our ultimate objective of democratizing rain harvesting throughout all remote areas where basic water and sanitation is most deficient and inconsistent.' Gabriela Saade and Joshua Kao, Co-Founders of LivingWaters Systems
The second prize of $25,000 went to Permalution, a startup company harnessing fog and clouds with its innovative technology, consisting of three main components; Fog Atlas - a predictive model identifying optimal project locations based on fog and cloud patterns (25% of the world currently mapped); Water Radar - meteorological sensors that analyse clouds and fog to estimate water yields, assess water quality, and conduct cost-benefit analyses and Fog Collectors - passive devices with hydrophilic membranes that gather water droplets from the air, collecting between 150-400 litres per day per unit.
Permalution’s CEO, Tatiana Estevez, said "At Permalution we are deeply honored to receive the second prize for the RELX Environmental Challenge. This recognition reinforces our commitment to bringing our innovative solutions for cloud and fog water collection to address water scarcity and ensure access to clean water for communities worldwide. With this milestone, we will accelerate our efforts to create sustainable impact through our current projects for fog water collection in Morocco and Ethiopia.”
This year’s winners were selected from a shortlist of four projects that were presented to the Challenge’s panel of judges including Dr Mark van Loosdrecht, Professor of Biochemical Engineering, Delft University of Technology and 2018 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate, Dr Lewis Collins, Editor of One Earth, a Cell Press journal publishing research in environmental change and sustainability science and Virginia Gardiner a sanitation expert and inventor and CEO of Loowatt, a waterless toilet system and first prize winner of the 2016 RELX Environmental Challenge.
For enquiries about RELX Environmental Challenge contact: Mirieme.hill@relx.com
