Seaweed and stoves win £1m climate prize

Can ordinary people save the world? World leaders have not found an answer to the climate crisis. But
now a major environmental prize aims to support normal people with big ideas.

Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez and Pierre Paslier were in their student kitchen in London when they decided to start a business. They could never have imagined where it would take them.

Eight years later their business, Notpla, was named by Prince William as the winner of a £1m climate prize. Notpla, which uses seaweed to make packaging for takeaways, was one of five companies named as winners of the Earthshot prize at the ceremony in Boston, USA. The Earthshot prize gives grants to companies with innovative solutions for environmental problems. It aims to help inventors and scientists spread their ideas around the world. Over 10 years, £50m will be given out to different companies.

The winners of the prize are from countries all across the globe. In Kenya, Charlot Magayi’s company Mukuru Clean Stoves makes stoves that use fuel made from charcoal, wood and sugarcane instead of solid fuels. This
causes much less air pollution.

In Oman, Talal Hasan’s project 44.01 aims to turn carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into rock, so it can be stored cheaply and safely without causing global warming.

And in Australia, the Indigenous Women of the Great Barrier Reef have trained more than 60 women in traditional and digital methods of protecting the ocean.