Project type: Development
Mentor: Manar Alsaif

Website: Neutreeno
Mentor: Manar Alsaif, Business Partnerships Manager (Energy), University of Cambridge Development Office

Climate change and the reduction of carbon emissions is a global issue. The U.K.’s objective is to reduce emissions by 78% by 2035, requiring mandatory reporting by all companies by 2025. These evaluations are mandatory through regulatory requirements and internally from investors & shareholders. However, this a challenging and costly task as 75-99% of enterprise’s emissions come from their complex, opaque supply chains consisting mainly of small-to-medium enterprise (SME) suppliers. The suppliers themselves are resource and expertise constrained, having no in-house capabilities for measuring or reporting emissions. The result is an inability to accurately measure worldwide emissions and decarbonise the global economy.

Therefore Neutreeno was set up to reinvent the way companies decarbonise. Neutreeno is a B2B “software as a service” climate-tech spinout from the University of Cambridge. They are engineering the world’s first greenhouse gases instrument to simultaneously reduce both companies’ emissions and costs. Their approach shifts the paradigm from Net Zero offsetting to true emissions reductions – Real Zero. Neutreeno’s sustainability team includes IPCC climate scientists, low-carbon technical & process engineers with support from the Cambridge Engineering Department’s Resource Efficiency group, the Judge Business School, Entrepreneur First, Innovate UK and Cambridge Enterprise.

Given that the majority of supply chains are based in low and middle-income countries, the challenge for the i-Team is to investigate the current state of the market in terms of emissions monitoring. The questions they will seek to answer include:

  • How do manufacturers in LMICs currently calculate their emissions?
  • Are they required to do so by their own government or by their buyers?
  • How much of a priority is emission management to LMIC manufacturers? Is this based on customer preference? Does this vary between sectors?
  • What are the sector-specific approaches that manufacturers in LMICs are pursuing in order to reduce factory emissions?
  • Who do LMIC manufacturers think should fund the costs associated with reducing manufacturing emissions?