Beginning next week, the Greenpeace Challenge will seek out and support ideas from designers, engineers, inventors and others around the world to design a simple, reliable, portable water pump powered by renewable energy. Ingo Boltz of the Greenpeace Innovation Lab explains the project here. Please spread the word and share your ideas!
When markets are slow to deliver new products that can help us save the planet, a focused innovation effort to create them can create a breakthrough. Greenpeace “solutions campaigns” have done that in the past.
When, for example, the refrigeration industry insisted that HFC free fridges were impossible, we hired engineers to design just such a fridge. We helped get it built, introduced it into the market and created a completely new paradigm. “Greenfreeze” technology took the world by storm; today 600 million fridges are sold every year with that technology.
Starting September 3rd, we are trying to do that yet again – with a twist. This time, the product we replace will be dirty diesel water pumps — ten million of them are used to irrigate the fields of small farmers in India.
Pumps powered by renewable energy instead can cut emissions, speed a transition to fossil fuel alternatives, and help farmers who are increasingly unable to afford the rising price of diesel fuel that is forcing them out of agriculture and into city slums in search of work. Existing renewable powered pumps, such as solar pumps, are too expensive, too weak, and not portable enough.
Instead of hiring a bunch of engineers to design away in their workshop, we are doing what Greenpeace does best: mobilising people to work together. We are asking people to participate in an open innovation challenge.
The Greenpeace Innovation Lab, together with Greenpeace India, is calling engineers, inventors and garage tinkerers, students and designers all over the world to come together at www.greenpeacechallenge.org and create a breakthrough pump that is cheap, powerful and portable enough to seriously compete with diesel pumps.
After the challenge closes on November 15th, a jury of renowned experts, as well as the community itself, will award prizes worth 30k Euros for the best designs.
And because designs are not enough, we have planning an implementation program including a prototyping workshop, in-field beta testing in India, and market acceleration for the winning pump designs. It’s a moonshot. It’s ambitious — so far nobody has created a pump that could really replace diesel pumps but we trust in the power of people mobilized all over the world.
If you are interested, please participate! If you know somebody who might be a good fit, please let them know! Together, we can create an energy [r]evolution in small farming!
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