RELX
Environmental
Challenge

rising to the challenge

According to the World Health Organization around 800m people worldwide lack basic access to clean water and water scarcity affects more than 40 per cent of the world’s population. These figures are alarming. Yet global water stress is increasing, with population growth, socio-economic development and changing consumption patterns driving up demand by about 1 percent a year since the 1980s.

Equally worrying is the fact that some 2bn people around the world have no access to basic sanitation, with most of these communities using basic pit latrines or buckets or defecating in the open, putting them at risk of diarrhoea, a condition that kills more children than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined.

Making this situation worse is the rapid expansion of urban populations in cities where, according to UN-Habitat, the United Nations agency for human settlements, more than 1bn people (or one in eight) live in slums, most of which are not connected to municipal water or sanitation systems.

Without radical new systems and technologies, it will be impossible to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, which aims to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.

Yet, this is not the only goal dependent on universal access to water and sanitation. Meeting SDG 1, focused on poverty, and SDG 3, focused on health and wellbeing, depends on access to water and sanitation.

Meanwhile, SDG 4 (quality education for all) and SDG 5 (gender equality) are also closely linked to water since, if it is unavailable in the home, it is women and girls who are usually responsible for water collection. “That’s not productive time,” says Mark van Loosdrecht, a RELX Environmental Challenge judge, chair professor in environmental biotechnology at the Delft University of Technology and recipient of the 2018 Stockholm Water Prize for his work to revolutionize water and wastewater treatment. “So it leads to a loss of human capacity.”

Rewarding the innovators

It was the recognition of how central water is to human development that in 2010 led RELX to start developing an idea for a competition that would celebrate promising innovations that could advance global access to water and sanitation.

Márcia Balisciano, Chief Sustainability Officer and Global Head of Corporate Responsibility at RELX recalls: "It took us a while to figure out what we wanted to do. In 2010, there was a huge focus on climate change. But the one resource that seemed to be getting short shrift, and which is ultimately affected by climate change, was water.”

The result, launched in 2011, was the RELX Environmental Challenge, which awards projects and technologies that advance access to safe water or sanitation through sustainable solutions that can be scaled up.

Applicants can be individuals or organisations. They might work in the for-profit or non-profit sectors. They might be physicists, chemists, or work in business. But what they all have in common is that their innovation meets the criteria RELX set out for the competition. Submissions for the award must:

• Be replicable, scalable and sustainable and set a benchmark for innovation
• Have practical applicability
• Address non-discrimination and equity of access
• Involve and have an impact on a wide range of stakeholders
• Involve local communities

“It might be an individual who is really passionate and has a project that needs support to get beyond the pilot stage or it could be a social enterprise or a university lab,” says Balisciano. “But there’s a common entrepreneurial thread that unites all our winners.”

That passion and entrepreneurial spirit is hard to miss when looking at the projects and talking to some of the winners. And for many of those behind the innovations, an event, an experience, or an encounter was what spurred them into action.

It was meeting Alexander Løcke, an industrial designer, that led Johan Jensen to make a momentous decision: to leave his job at Maersk, the Danish shipping group, and join Løcke in working on a low-cost solar water purification technology that used ultraviolet radiation from direct sunlight. “I quickly realised the project was so exciting I had to be working full time on it," says Jensen. "A week later I quit my job.”

The result was SolarSack, which won the RELX Environmental Challenge 1st prize in 2019. This durable, lightweight bag with a tap, a handle, and a dispenser can be hung up in the home and, after four hours in direct sunlight, provides 4 litres of safe drinking water. Its price – $2 wholesale and around $4 to consumers – is as important as effectiveness. “We started with a dream to bring safe drinking water to all who need it at a price point where end-users could afford to buy it. That’s what sets us apart,” says Jensen. “Now we have grown to a team of 11 with over 50,000 SolarSacks being used in multiple countries.”

More than money

In designing the Environmental Challenge, the RELX team of course created a prize that came with a financial reward. Winners receive a $50,000 prize for a first place entry and a $25,000 prize for second place. However, as the experiences of past winners demonstrate, the benefit of the award extends beyond the money.

Winners, for example, also receive free access for a year to ScienceDirect, the subscription-based scientific, technical and medical database provided by RELX’s Elsevier subsidiary. It includes almost 250,000 articles in environmental sciences that have been published since 2000. “That helped our team a lot because some of the areas we were looking at researching we found in the ScienceDirect database,” says SolarSack’s Jensen. “It’s hard to calculate how many hours and how much money it would have cost us to find knowledge that others had already found, so having access to those data is important.”

In addition, the award raises the profile of the winners, helping them secure additional funding or partnerships with governments, companies and other innovators. “The RELX grant is a big thing in terms of credibility and recognition,” says Flexcrevator’s de los Reyes. “That was a big boost for us. And then practically it also allowed us to reach out to partners in Rwanda, Madagascar and Ghana.”

For the Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology (CAWST), the profile of the award brought attention to its innovation, which enabled it to embark on further research. CAWST won the RELX Environmental Challenge 1st prize in 2012 for a project developed in Nepal by its research director, Tommy Ngai, which modified conventional biosand filters with iron particles to improve the removal of all four biological water contaminants, including viruses. The award helped CAWST embark on research projects with institutions such as the University of Illinois, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology and the Japan International Cooperation Agency. “RELX was an important launchpad for additional research by CAWST and others on the biosand filter,” says Shauna Curry, CAWST CEO. “It helped us to profile the biosand filter as an important solution, with interesting research potential.”

To celebrate 10 years of the RELX Environmental Challenge, the team have introduced a 10-year prize to encourage past winners to collaborate on improved water and sanitation projects that draw on their respective array of impressive technologies, skills, networks and on the ground experience.