Teenager’s bright way to do ironing up for William’s Earthshot prize
‘I want to inspire students around the world to take a keen interest in science’
A 14-YEAR-OLD schoolgirl is among the contenders to win a £1million prize from the Duke of Cambridge after inventing a solar-powered ironing cart to cut pollution.
While others her age were on school strikes to protest about climate change, Vinisha Umashankar turned her hand to engineering, designing a contraption run on five hours of sunshine to transform a traditional trade in India.
There are currently around 10 million ironing carts in her country running on charcoal, which burn constantly throughout the day, causing lung disease and high levels of pollution. Vinisha joins 14 others in the running for five £1million prizes in the Duke of Cambridge’s Earthshot Prize, and is already receiving advice on how to scale her invention to sell it at an affordable price in India, before exporting across Asia and Africa.
“As the youngest finalist, I want to inspire students around the world to take a keen interest in science to innovate products and solutions for protecting our air, water and land for people, animals and plants,” Vinisha said.
She faces competition from two others in the “clean our air” category: the Blue Map App, China’s first public environmental database enabling citizens to hold polluters to account, and Takachar from India, which creates profitable products from agricultural waste to put a stop to the burning of crops.
The prize received around 750 nominations from 86 countries.
No UK projects made the final, although Dr Thomas Crowther, the founder of the Swiss-based online platform Restor, is British. The website invites people around the world to share their efforts in local conservation. It is a finalist in the “protect and restore nature” category, along with the Pole Pole Foundation, which protects gorillas and communities who live near them in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Republic of Costa Rica, which is paying citizens to restore natural ecosystems in its rainforests.
Prince William said of the nominees: “They are working with the urgency required in this decisive decade for life on Earth and will inspire all of us with their optimism in our ability to rise to the greatest challenges in human history.”
All 15 finalists will now receive tailored support and resources from the Earthshot Prize Global Alliance Members, a network of private-sector businesses tasked with helping to scale their climate solutions.
Five winners will be selected by the Earthshot Prize Council and will receive £1million in prize money at the inaugural ceremony, on Oct 17 in London. Other finalists include Coral Vita in the Bahamas, which restores dying coral reefs, Living Seawalls in Australia, which builds panels of marine life, and the US conservation project Pristine Seas. The city of Milan is honoured for a project to cut food waste, along with Sanergy from Kenya, which converts human waste into safe fertiliser, and WOTA BOX, a tiny water-treatment plant from Japan.
The “fix our climate” award will be between AEM Electrolyser, which replaces fossil fuels with green hydrogen, solar-powered Reeddi Capsules from Nigeria, and Solbazaar, an energy exchange network in Bangladesh.