SBRI Removing air pollutants from homes to safeguard health

Overview

The aim of the competition is to develop and demonstrate new products or services which will extract harmful pollutants from the air in domestic environments in order to safeguard the health of occupants, particularly young or vulnerable people.

Scope

This competition aims to address the challenge of poor air quality in the home by supporting research and development (R&D) for affordable domestic products or services.

Your solution must be able to protect the health of residents by removing one or more harmful household pollutants from the air in homes. This can include any which have entered the domestic setting from outside.

Phase 1: research and development contracts, feasibility study

In phase 1 you must:

• demonstrate the technical feasibility of the proposed innovation
• develop the plan and lay the foundations to deliver in phase 2
• establish collaborations and agreements which will enable testing of the innovation in a real-world setting as part of phase 2

Your project can focus on extracting one type of pollutant, or a range of specified pollutants, if there is a well-established case demonstrating the hazard to human health from that pollutant.

Eligibility

To lead a project, you can:

• be an organisation of any size
• work alone or with other organisations

Contracts will be awarded only to a single legal entity. However, if you can justify subcontracting components of the work, you can employ specialist consultants or advisers. This work will still be the responsibility of the main contractor.

Projects are expected to start by 1 April 2021, end by 1 July 2021 and can last up to 3 months.

Exclusions

This competition will not fund projects that:

• prevent the release of pollutants rather than extracting them from the atmosphere
• focus on extracting pollutants which have no demonstrated health impact
• generate more harmful pollutants than are removed
• result in a significant negative overall environmental impact

Funding Costs

A total of up to £300,000, inclusive of VAT, is allocated to phase 1.

Phase 1 feasibility study R&D contracts will be up to £50,000, inclusive of VAT, for each project for up to 3 months. It is expected to fund up to 6 projects.

In Phase 2 up to 2 contracts will be awarded to organisations chosen from the successful phase 1 participants. Up to £900,000 inclusive of VAT will be allocated for each contract in phase 2, to develop a prototype and undertake field testing for up to 12 months.

Your application must have at least 50% of the contract value attributed directly and exclusively to R&D services, including solution exploration and design. R&D can also include prototyping and field-testing the product or service. This lets you incorporate the results of your exploration and design and demonstrate that you can produce in quantity to acceptable quality standards.

R&D does not include:

• commercial development activities such as quantity production
• supply to establish commercial viability or to recover R&D costs
• integration, customisation or incremental adaptations and improvements to existing products or processes