Sustainabili-three to watch

Marks & Clerk was very proud to be a sponsor of #21toWatch this year, a campaign that showcases outstanding talent across Cambridge and the East of England’s science and technology industries. In this next article for our Cambridge Green Growth series, we take a closer look at some of the 2025 winners working in the Green Tech space and highlight the important work they are doing.

Evoralis is a University of Cambridge spin-out company which develops enzyme technology to break down plastics, allowing the recovered monomers to then be reused. Evoralis’ approach is to develop tailored enzymes for recycling specific plastics (e.g. polyester, nylon, elastane etc.) using a combination of microfluidic ultra-high-throughput screening and bioinformatics. Whilst Evoralis’ technology can be employed in a number of different industries, their focus is on textiles, the aim being to ultimately make over 80% of textiles recyclable. This is an important issue to address: as discussed in my earlier article, according to a report by the government recycling body, Wrap, about half of the 1.45 million tonnes of used textiles generated annually in the UK ends up in household waste and this is mostly then incinerated. Evoralis raised £2.5 million in a seed funding round last year and they have recently acquired laboratory space in the prestigious Co-Labs by journey facility in Cambridge.

Reclinker, formerly known as Cambridge Electric Cement, is another University of Cambridge spin-out company which has invented the world's first zero-emissions cement. Concrete is an unavoidable material in the construction industry but is responsible for about 8% of the world’s total CO₂ emissions. The scientists at Reclinker realised that the cement powder obtained from concrete waste (e.g. from the demolition of old buildings) can be used in place of lime as the flux in a conventional steel recycling process. As the steel melts, the cement powder forms a slag that floats on the liquid steel, to protect it from oxygen in the air. After the recycled steel is tapped off, the liquid slag is cooled and ground up into a powder which is virtually identical to the reactive component of cement made in the traditional way. In 2024, Reclinker closed a £2.25 million seed funding round, which is being used to industrialise production of its sustainable cement at CELSA UK’s EAF facility in Cardiff. Reclinker was recently named winner of the Mature Solutions category at the Innovation Zero Awards 2025.

Lambda Agri, which is the trading name of Lambda Energy, is a University of Cambridge spin-in company that has developed a light-changing spray coating and film for greenhouse panels, which can increase crop yield by 20%. The spray coating and film contains molecules that can convert higher-energy ultraviolet (UV) light from the sun into lower-energy red light, a photosynthetically active radiation that can boost plant growth. The technique is also much more environmentally friendly than the alternative of providing custom LED lighting to a greenhouse. Lambda Agri was the winner of the Energy Category in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Emerging Technologies 2023 Competition. 

Congratulations to all three winners for their achievements so far in working towards a more sustainable future. We look forward to following their progress over the coming years as the various technologies no doubt become invaluable to our everyday lives.