Announcing the winners of the 2021 RELX Environmental Challenge

RELX has announced the winners of the 2021 RELX Environmental Challenge, which supports innovative solutions to improve sustainable access to safe water and sanitation.

RELX, a global provider of information and analytics for professional and business customers across industries has today announced the winners of the 2021 RELX Environmental Challenge. Now in its 11th year, the competition supports innovative solutions that improve sustainable access to safe water and sanitation where it is at risk. The RELX Environmental Challenge advances United Nations Sustainable Goal (SDG) 6: Clean water and sanitation for all, one of the 17 SDGs featured on the free RELX SDG Resource Centre, which aims to illuminate the SDGs for everyone.

A shortlist of seven projects were chosen from more than 180 applications. The 2021 shortlist comprised of Mosan - a circular sanitation system; a project to deploy bio additive decontaminants in humanitarian crisis situations; a data-driven solution for safe chlorine water treatment; MajiPlus 2.0 - a solar-powered, e-payment distribution system; a low-cost and real time contamination detection system developed and built in Nepal; biodigesters that divert waste from rivers and generate incomes and an innovative approach to managing waste products from the palm oil industry.

The 2021 $50,000 first prize winner is Green Empowerment, a US based charity operating in Latin America, Southeast Asia and Africa. The project addresses the challenge of reliable water treatment in low-resource communities through the use of a robust, autonomous, sensor-based Chlorine Management System (CMS). Through the use of data, the innovative system uses a consumable sensor to collect community specific patterns of water consumption, as well as water quality ranges specific to the community's water source to develop a predictive algorithm for effective water chlorination. Andrea Johnson, Executive Director at Green Empowerment says ""Green Empowerment believes in innovation that is designed in collaboration with partners and communities who will most benefit from the new technology. This is the foundation for our Chlorine Management System which is aimed to improve the water treatment in community-owned and operated water systems. The RELX prize will help us accelerate the field testing and improvements in our prototype for immediate benefit to community partners while positioning us to maximize the potential of this solution beyond communities where Green Empowerment and our partners work."

The $25,000 second prize winner is Mosan, an international social enterprise offering circular, off-grid dry sanitation services for densely populated settlements. The sanitation system features the Mosan Toilet - an award-winning, in-home toilet, designed with the highest technical standards. A community-led model and the strong role of users and the local populations enables operational costs and maintenance costs to be kept low.

Judges include one of the world's leading experts in water research, Dr Mark van Loosdrecht, Professor of Biochemical Engineering at Delft University of Technology; Dr Márcia Balisciano, RELX's Global Head of Corporate Responsibility; Kevin Agnew, head of environment at RELX and Dr Lewis Collins, Editor in Chief of Cell Press journal, One Earth.

Read the full story of the RELX Environmental Challenge and a decade of clean water and sanitation innovation: RELX Environmental Challenge: Supporting water and sanitation innovators since 2011.

Enquiries

Mirième Hill
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Notes to Editors

About RELX Environmental Challenge

The RELX Environmental Challenge was launched in 2011 and is awarded to projects that best demonstrate how they can provide sustainable access to safe water where it is presently at risk and/or access to improved sanitation. Projects must have clear practical applicability, address identified need, and advance related issues such as health, education, or human rights. According to the World Health Organisation and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme 2017 report, some 3 in 10 people worldwide, or 2.1 billion, lack access to safe, readily available water at home, and 6 in 10, or 4.5 billion, lack safely managed sanitation. Poor access to safe water and sanitation contributes to health crises in many developing countries, and increasingly leads to violent conflict.

About RELX

RELX is a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers. The Group serves customers in more than 180 countries and has offices in about 40 countries. It employs over 33,000 people, of whom almost half are in North America. The shares of RELX PLC, the parent company, are traded on the London, Amsterdam and New York Stock Exchanges using the following ticker symbols: London: REL; Amsterdam: REN; New York: RELX. The total market capitalisation is approximately £42.4bn, €50.2bn, $58.1bn.

About the RELX SDG Resource Centre

The free RELX SDG Resource Centre features leading-edge articles, reports, tools, events, videos and legal practical guidance from across RELX and key United Nations and other partners, to advance awareness, understanding and implementation of the 17 SDGs which aim to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all people by 2030. The SDG News Tracker on the homepage provides up-to-the minute news about the SDGs from around the world, searching millions of articles published daily across more than 75,000 news sources including in the six UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish and Russian), as well as German. See original research including the RELX SDG Graphics looking at the state of knowledge underpinning the SDGs, as well as tools and podcasts, including The SDG Impact of COVID-19 featuring the view of a range of thought leaders across a range of disciplines.