Wednesday, August 26 2020 – Electric scooter batteries from biomass, removing organic waste from landfill, and a dedicated biodiesel factory for farmers are the three ideas that won the Australian final of the world’s biggest cleantech competition, ClimateLaunchpad.

From around 50 Aussie entrants, these three clean-tech start-ups have progressed to to the South East Asian Final, on September 18 and hopefully, from there, at least one Aussie entrant will make it to the Global Grand Final on September 30 – October 2.

Christopher Lee, CEO of Climate-KIC Australia, the organisation responsible for running the competition in Australia says: “The ClimateLaunchpad competition is a great way to support new business ideas that have the potential to mitigate climate change.

“These ideas are at the baby stage. They need mentoring, training, and wisdom from experienced people to become viable. That’s what ClimateLaunchpad is all about because realistically, the world is going to need hundreds of thousands of little ideas, all coming to fruition, to challenge our current business models and create a green and clean future.”

Stedman Ellis, CEO of the Future Batteries Industries CRC, this year’s sponsor of the event, says: “It’s great being able to support such high calibre cleantech innovations, and help get them out of the lab and into the world.”

In first place: LOCALCYCLE (NSW): Collecting organic waste from cafes, restaurants, offices and councils and instead of transporting it long distances to rot in landfill, processing it locally into compost, fertilizer and mushroom kits

In second place: SEED 2 DIESEL (QLD): Collecting farmers’ oilseed crops for processing in a shared facility and returning it as cleaner biodiesel to run their machinery

In third place: ELEVENSTORE (VIC): Turning clean, plentiful biomass into cheap, light batteries for electric scooters in the Asian market

Winners at the Global Grand Final will share in $30,000 prize money, while all 16 grand finalists get access to the Climate-KIC Accelerator, the renowned business school.

ABOUT CLIMATELAUNCHPAD

ClimateLaunchpad is an initiative of the EIT Climate-KIC. Globally, ClimateLaunchpad has generated more than 6,700 ideas that resulted in the creation of more than 8,000 jobs within 1,900 new companies.