For the sixth year in a row, Cleantech Estonia, a green innovation accelerator, organised a 24-hour “climathon” – a global gathering of tech and startup minds with an aim to find solutions for net zero emissions; Estonian World highlights five environmentally conscious business ideas from the event.
Climathon, that this year took place from 29-30 October in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, is a global community of local changemakers and innovators working together to help their cities achieve net zero emissions. This year, the topic was quite broad – any solution that contributes to reducing the greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2030 by 40%, to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 in Tallinn, was welcome.
The participants had the opportunity to attend several workshops that provided them with new skills and knowledge so they could elevate their ideas, boost collaboration and boundless ideation as well as receive instant and critical feedback from the mentors to reiterate and advance their ideas.
Five ideas were presented:
CarbonPool
CarbonPool is an easy-to-use, open trading platform where compliance carbon market quotas are traded (Ex EUA on the European carbon market). The marketplace aims to bring liquidity to the currently stiff and opaque secondary market. It will allow both large buyers and private traders to meet on a transparent platform, following the growing trend of impact trading and trading democratisation.
WasteLocker
WasteLocker is a personalised sorting service, where the customer can track the sorted waste containers with a QR code. WasteLocker aims to gain value from all recyclable materials and offers on-demand solutions for sorting, cleaning and tracing waste so that the process is transparent.
Ringkott
Ringkott is a circular solution for replacing the single use take-away delivery bags with reusable bags in food outlets. A client pays a deposit for a bag and on returning the bag, receives either a new bag or all the deposit back.
ZeroPunkt
ZeroPunkt is an app for reducing waste. People joining the app distribute their surplus food and household items, giving them away for free to their neighbours.
FEW
FEW is a database of fuel, electricity and waste in renewable vs non-renewable percentages. The database is built by a legal team that aims to encourage companies to collect and report information about their fuel consumption, their energy consumption and their waste recyclability to attract further green investments and provide comparable data for different industries in percentages.
Cover: Participants of Climathon 2021 in Tallinn, Estonia. Photo by Climathon.
