The Earthshot Prize, created by the Duke of Cambridge, rewards people trying to save the planet. At the inaugural award ceremony, Italy won two awards.
The environmental prize is designed to “incentivise change and help repair our planet over the next 10 years”. No celebrities flew to London for the ceremony. The stage did not use plastic in construction and guests “considered the environment” when choosing an outfit.
Each year for the next decade, the prize is awarding £1m each to five projects working to find solutions to the planet’s environmental problems.
Build a waste-free world
The City of Milan won the ‘build a waste-free world’ award for its food-waste hubs. These hubs recover food that would otherwise be binned, mainly from supermarkets and company canteens, and give it to NGOs who distribute it to the neediest citizens.
Each of the city’s three hubs recover about 130 tonnes of food per year.
Fix our climate award
Italy-based firm Enapter, meanwhile, won the ‘fix our climate’ for its pioneering AEM Electrolyser technology. This turns renewable electricity into emission-free hydrogen gas and it already fuels cars and planes, powers industry and heats homes.
What is the Earthshot Prize?
The Earthshot Prize is the most ambitious and prestigious of its kind – designed to incentivise change and help to repair our planet over the next ten years.
The prize takes inspiration from President John F. Kennedy’s Moonshot. That project united millions of people around an organising goal to put man on the moon and catalysed the development of new technology in the 1960s. The Earthshot Prize centres around five ‘Earthshots’ – simple but ambitious goals for our planet. If we achieve these by 2030, they will improve life for us all, for generations to come.
The awards will also be available to stream on discovery+ from 19 October.
