Scooter batteries from biomass, cool furniture from organic waste, and a dedicated biodiesel factory for farmers - just three of the ideas that are vying for victory in the Australian leg of the world’s biggest Cleantech competition, ClimateLaunchpad.

Every year, thousands of start-up green tech companies enter their local ClimateLaunchpad competition, hoping to make it to the Global Grand Final.

From around 50 Aussie entrants, six have been chosen to pitch their green business ideas to a National Jury, live over Zoom from 5 - 6:30pm on Thursday August 26, and you’re invited to watch and vote on your favourites.

The top three ideas will progress to the South East Asian Final, hosted by Indonesia, and hopefully, from there, at least one Aussie entrant will make it to the Global Grand Final on September 30 - October 2.

Christopher Lee, CEO of Climate-KIC Australia, the organisation responsible for running the competition in Australia says, “The ClimateLaunchpad competition is a great way to support new business ideas that have the potential to mitigate climate change.

“These ideas are at the baby stage. They need mentoring, training, and wisdom from experienced people to become viable. That’s what ClimateLaunchpad is all about because realistically, the world is going to need hundreds of thousands of little ideas, all coming to fruition, to challenge our current business models and create a green and clean future.”

Stedman Ellis, CEO of the Future Batteries Industries CRC, this year’s sponsor of the event, says: “It’s great being able to support such high calibre cleantech innovations, and help get them out of the lab and into the world."

The six Australian finalists are:

ELEVENSTORE (VIC): Turning biomass into cheap, light batteries for bikes, scooters and electric vehicles

LOCALCYCLE (NSW): Taking organic waste from cafes, restaurants, offices and councils and turning it into compost, fertilizer, mushroom kits and even furniture

SEED 2 DIESEL (QLD): Collecting farmers’ oilseed crops for processing and returning it as biodiesel to run their machinery

RECYSLAG (WA): New technology that takes copper slag waste and extracts the cobalt for use in batteries

ECONOMICAL ENERGY (SA): An energy storage solution that enables renewables producers to store large amounts of energy using the power of gravity

GEOFLY (WA): A new industrial process to turn fly ash from coal mines into concrete that’s more environmentally friendly