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Five startups who are using tech to help clean up London’s toxic air

How do you solve a problem like London’s toxic deadly air? For the Mayor one of the answers is punitive congestion charges to gradually wean drivers off heavily polluting diesel vehicles with the new ultra low emission zone (ULEZ) set to be launched in April 2019.

However, for some such initiatives do not go nearly far enough and do nothing to help clean up our air now, which is currently causing over 9,400 early deaths per year.

For those wanting action now, innovative technology trialled by startups and SMEs across London is increasingly being viewed as one of the key fronts in battling dirty air and getting toxicity down to legal levels.

With that in mind, Bdaily London has cherry picked some of the firms currently either trialling or developing technologies that could have a major role to play in the coming years.

Vantage Power

This Greenford-headquartered company is developing hybrid engines for buses, which can be retrofitted for both new and old vehicles to make them greener and more energy efficient.

Thanks to cost savings associated with the technology, Vantage Power claims that it can retrofit four traditional, pollutant spewing diesel buses for the same cost as purchasing one new bus, providing tempting cost efficiencies for operators in London and beyond.

With public transport and buses in particular playing such a big role in the capital’s noxious air problems, the manufacturer’s innovation has certainly caught the eye, with Prince Phillip paying a visit earlier this year and a £2.5m raise in March.

Vivacity Labs

With average traffic speeds in central London dropping to the preposterously low level of 7.8mph according to Transport for London (TfL), idling car traffic is both bad news for motorists and the environment.

Holborn’s Vivacity Lab’s is putting its machine learning algorithms to work analysing traffic and pedestrian flows in urban environments to provide real-time monitoring and data for organisations and local government.

Making smarter use of our cities is one of the big challenges over the coming decades, as streets and roads wheeze under the pressure of over-development and population growth.

As such, insights from big data and urban sensors will prove a key weapon for policymakers looking to more intelligently plan development and expansion in London.

Gliide

While carpooling and ridesharing have been widely touted as solutions to road congestion and pollution in our cities, the cold hard facts suggest that, in the short-term at least, the likes of Uber have actually made the problem worse.

Figures released by the Department of Transport earlier this month suggested that following Uber’s launch in London, the number of private hire vehicles swelled from around 59,000 in 2009/10 to over 100,000 now.

Enter Gliide, the transport app which styles itself as the ‘100% electric, intelligent chauffeur driven car service’, bringing a sustainable ride hailing service to London with a fleet of Tesla Model S electric cars.

Initially invite-only, the service is now available to anyone with a credit or debit card and provides a sustainable alternative to its more well-known rivals.

Nymbly

The Cambridge-based Internet of Things (IoT) startup was recently awarded a £50,000 grant from Future Cities Catapult to test its air quality app on the recently deployed Things Connected IoT network in the capital.

Utilising the latest sensors, Nymbly has developed an app which can detect air quality down to room level, giving building operators more control over ventilation, humidity and filtering in their properties.

While the startup admits it can do little about street-level air quality, its app could help to lessen the impact of pollutants within buildings utilising its system.

BuggyAir

BuggyAir is another IoT startup that was recently awarded a share of a £50,000 grant from Future Cities Catapult to support the prototyping of its sensor technology, providing a platform for real-time pollutant data for pedestrians and cyclists.

Some of the organisation’s early work has been targeted at monitoring the long-term health impacts of toxic air on children, with its compact air quality detector and GPS tracking sensor currently being utilised by London parents to monitor their child’s exposure to ground-level air pollution.

It has stated that its aim is to provide new data sets and maps which can help to trigger long-term behavioural change and encourage legislative developments, including more traffic-free zones and smarter speed restrictions.