SBRI Removing air pollutants from homes to safeguard health

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.

This is phase 1 of a potential 2-phase competition. A decision to proceed with phase 2 will depend on the outcomes from phase 1 and assessment of a separate application into a subsequent phase 2 competition.

Only successful applicants from phase 1 will be able to apply to take part in phase 2.

Your project

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

Applicant

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.

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. We expect 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.

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.

You may wish to work with academics or health care specialists who can help test and validate the effectiveness of proposed solutions.

This competition is funded as part of the UKRI Strategic Priorities Fund Clean Air Programme. Successful projects should be prepared to actively engage throughout the life of their project with the broader programme to share insight and increase the overall impact of the work.

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.

We 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

An applicant briefing webinar will be held on 1st December at 11.30am.