Enabling telecommuters working from home

Connected online communication services provide the means to work across geographies and between businesses seamlessly. This allows employees to use internal systems and connect with colleagues remotely, including from their own home, reducing commuting. Emission savings are achieved through avoiding commuter travel in either cars, trains or buses. Online meeting technology also allows internal and external meetings to be conducted between multiple persons without the need for all people to be physically present in the same place. The use of cameras, screens and smart meeting rooms avoids the need for business travel to the meeting location. The impact of avoided business travel can be significant if air travel is prevented. Current avoided emissions calculated per year (2018). https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/corporate-responsibility-report/2018/environment/efficiency.html

United States

Smart rice cultivation

Farmers can use Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) as a more efficient method of rice cultivation. This involves allowing fields to dry down between floods on rice fields. By decreasing the amount of time fields remain flooded, AWD reduces water use, fuel and electricity use for running irrigation pumps, and the need for nitrogen fertilizers, while also slowing down the anaerobic activity that creates methane gas. However, AWD can be challenging. It requires farmers to control water levels carefully across large tracts of land. It also introduces risk to the rice crops, as it can be difficult to assess depth accurately with only a few measurements at various points in the fields. Together, these barriers have slowed adoption of AWD. AT&T connectivity enables water-level data to be remotely collected and connected to pumping systems to automatically control the water level in the rice fields. This helps both with the implementation of the AWD process and with the data collection required for verification of the carbon credits. Thus the technology helps to overcome barriers to implementation and increases the AWD adoption rate. Current avoided annual emissions calculated based on adoption of IoT-enabled AWD expanded to all rice farmers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas. http://about.att.com/content/dam/csr/otherpdfs/10x-Precision-King-FINAL.pdf

United States

Zero-emission, battery-electric buses

Proterra designs battery-electric vehicles for the transit industry. Designed from the start as an exclusively electric bus, the vehicle aims to provide flexibility and performance, with Proterra claiming the greatest range of any zero-emission, battery-electric bus in its class. Made with an advanced carbon-fiber reinforced body and efficient electric drivetrain, the bus is designed to endure nearly two decades of on-road service, with minimal maintenance required.

United States

Stirling engine low-temperature electricity generation

Cool Energy have developed a low-temperature Stirling engine for distributed, on-site heat-to-electricity applications. Liquid or gas heat streams are converted into mechanical energy to produce electricity. According to Cool Energy, the system differs from other Stirling engines in that it is optimized to run at lower input heat temperatures than previous engines (150 °C to 400 °C fluids or gas up to 700 °C). The engines are a new approach to the well-known Stirling cycle, employing a new engine configuration, low-cost materials, non-combustion, self-lubricating components, a nitrogen working gas, and long service life.

United States

Plant-based alternatives to meat

Beyond Meat creates plant-based burgers, sausages, crumbles, and other products made directly from simple plant-based ingredients. By shifting from animal to plant-based meat the company aims to solve four growing issues attributed to livestock production: human health, climate change, constraints on natural resources and animal welfare. A life-cycle assessment of the Beyond Burger suggested that compared to an equivalent beef burger, it generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less energy, use 99% less water and has 93% less impact on land use.

United States

PeriDeals

PeriDeals wrote: A free app that gives college students real-time access to local markdown deals on meat and dairy. By securely integrating with inventory management software of participating stores, we may reliably provide our users with real time access to these deals. Stores win because they receive marketing focused on reducing inventory shrink and increasing foot traffic, while students win because they are given a valuable resource to save money on a balanced diet... Source: EIT Climate KIC's Climathon

United States

Light blue bag

Light blue bag wrote: Our solution proposes to process all types of plastics that we dispose of daily and what ends up in landfills and the environment, to turn them into new products. It is made up of 2 parts: education and awareness in society; and the final disposal of all these plastic wastes. The first part is to urge citizens to separate plastic waste from all the others we produce daily, without worrying about the way in which they dispose of this waste, if they should be washed and dried. We will use a plastic bag of a different color than those used to separate waste such as paper and glass... Source: EIT Climate KIC's Climathon

United States

2°- Climate data

2° wrote: Our solution would allow individuals to track and search the brands they use and better understand the impact global corporations have on the environment. Furthermore, people would be able to easily contact legislators and the companies through social media, email, by phone, etc. We've created a prototype of the database we would use to launch a full-scale application using data scraped from various sources as well as apis from opensecrets. Com. For the database we've used the django rest framework, but the same concept could easily be implemented using most modern database systems... Source: EIT Climate KIC's Climathon

United States

EcoWarriors-A-Social-Game-Challenge

Houston EcoDevelopers wrote: Game storyline: the global climate change becomes a huge problem on earth and many animals are on the edge of extinction. To prevent the mass extinction from happening, the users will play the role of ecowarriors, and each of them are assigned with a mysterious egg of an endangered animal. Each animal they are assigned will be the very last one of a species. The players will incubate each egg at the beginning stage of the game. After the players reach a certain score, the egg will reveal their assigned animal ( i. E. Penguin, dolphin, whale, polar bear.) depending on the player’s choice of challenge, a set of tasks will be shown. The tasks are daily action in a person’s life, and every completed task be tracked and converted to score... Source: EIT Climate KIC's Climathon

United States

EV Scholarship Challenge

MIS100 wrote: Ev scholarship challenge has two categories, which means there will be two winners. Also, the runner-up gets a prize, too!. $1500 essay category:write a maximum of 1000 words essay about the benefits of riding ev in houston. $1500 social media category:post a picture with a caption “where is ev?” with a car emoji. Post it on social media and whoever has the most “likes” within one week since the posted date wins. (hint: take a photo with celebrity, if possible. Be as creative as you can to get to reach your goal!). Make sure to make your post public, so that we can keep the count for the “likes. ” you will not get the credit, if we cannot see your post. Follow our tweeter, instagram, and facebook page to check if we got your score correctly... Source: EIT Climate KIC's Climathon

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