Five innovative climate change products in line for £52,000 prize

The FT Climate Change Challenge, backed by the Financial Times, HP and Forum for the Future, was established to find innovative products that can be developed and scaled up rapidly to make the greatest contribution to tackling climate change. The five finalists have been drawn from around 300 entries worldwide.

Mootral may sound like a bit of a joke, but the intention behind this natural antibiotic that reduces the methane produced by cows, sheep and other ruminants by limiting the growth of bacteria in their stomachs, is deadly serious.

Methane from ruminants is estimated to be responsible for 20 per cent of global warming and the garlic-based feed additive produced by UK firm Neem Biotech aims to reduce it by at least five per cent and up to 25 per cent with optimum dosage.

The cardboard cooker – designed to be used in rural Africa – is the product of Kenya’s Kyoto Energy Ltd. It consists of two cardboard boxes, one inside the other, with an acrylic cover that lets the sun’s power in, but stops it escaping. This fuel-less cooker is estimated to prevent two tonnes of carbon emissions per family per year.

The design is so simple that the ‘Kyoto Box’ can be produced in existing cardboard factories – it has just gone into production in a Nairobi factory that can produce 2.5 million boxes a month – and it can be flatpacked and distributed by lorry in its thousands.

Produced by US firm ADEF Ltd, Deflecktor is a lightweight aerodynamic cover for lorry wheels which improves fuel efficiency by reducing drag. Fitted onto the eight wheels of a truck and its trailer, the Deflecktor cover is calculated to cut fuel consumption by two per cent – a statistic that is reported to have caught the eye of multi-national trucking company Schneider National, which is testing the product on its 15,000-strong fleet. On average, ADEF says it takes six months to break even on the $50 Deflecktor outlay.

Evaporating Tiles – designed by Loughborough University in the UK – is an indoor cooling system that uses exhaust air to evaporate water within hollow tiles built into a false ceiling. The system uses half the energy of traditional air-conditioning systems and because the tiles don’t clog up and the materials don’t degrade, there are no significant maintenance costs.

The ‘Black Phantom’ is effectively a ‘giant microwave’ designed to turn biomass – agricultural waste, wood-chips, even possibly sewage – into charcoal, a very stable form of carbon that can buried, used as fertilizer or burnt as a highly-efficient fuel. The machine can fix nearly half the biomass put into it as charcoal. Designed by New Zealand and UK firm Carbonscape, the Black Phantom is small enough to fit inside a shipping container and be transported anywhere in the world.

The shortlist has been drawn up by a panel of judges that included climate change experts such as Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and Strategies for the Global Environment, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Jonathon Porritt, founder director of Forum for the Future, as well as leading industrialist like Sir Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin Group and Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy.

The eventual winner will be decided by a public vote and announced on April 3.