The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is inviting applications for its upcoming opportunity ‘Smart tracking of waste across the UK’ with the funding up to £400,000, to develop new digital solutions for tracking waste from its source to its treatment or destination.
Defra is to invest in projects that use digital technology to record and track the movement of waste through the economy. The investment is part of the government’s GovTech Catalyst, which aims to encourage businesses to come up with smart solutions to public sector challenges.
Processes for disposing of this waste are sometimes fragmented and often duplicated. Defra wants to know more about the waste being generated, how it is handled and disposed. This will maximise value from resources, improve UK productivity and minimise damage to the environment.
The competition is open to any organisation that can demonstrate a route to market for its idea and will open on 11 June 2018. This competition is in 2 phases. Phase 1 is for contracts of up to £80,000 to examine the feasibility of ideas. The best ideas could win a share of up to £1 million to develop and field test a prototype in a second phase.
Applications should be able to deal with the challenge of an estimated 23 million waste transactions across more than 100,000 regulated sites and 100,000 waste carriers. Successful projects will attract 100% funded development contracts. A briefing event will be held on 29 June 2018.
In the last report on total waste generation, the UK was estimated to have generated more than 200 million tonnes in a year.