Group One suggested reviving Kenwood’s plastic-free heritage by encouraging visitors to adopt reusable, repairable, and sustainable habits. For example, after enjoying coffee at the café, guests could take home garden cuttings in their compostable cups, giving them a second life.
Waste Not, Want Not — The Victorian Way
Kenwood’s Cup Library offers reusable cups that visitors borrow via a QR-linked app with rewards. After use, cups are returned to special bins, scanned for discounts or donations, then cleaned and reused—creating a sustainable, waste-free cycle.
Cup Library
Creative & sustainable online career and employability development
Sustainathon
About
This year, the Open University launched its first ever Sustainathon—a dynamic, week-long online event where STEM students teamed up to solve real-world sustainability challenges from leading charities.
The initiative aimed to boost students’ employability and sustainability awareness through hands-on, project-based learning. We were excited to partner with English Heritage and The Final Straw Foundation for our inaugural event.
English Heritage tasked students with tackling waste and recycling issues at London’s Kenwood estate, focusing on reducing visitor non-compliance. The Final Straw Foundation challenged teams to address nurdle (packaging pellets) pollution. These projects highlighted sustainability issues on different scales and inspired a diverse range of creative solutions.
Read more: https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/design/ou-sustainathon-2025-a-week-of-sustainable-innovation-and-student-collaboration/
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Challenges
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Groups
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Students
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Projects - Final Straw Foundation
Group Three suggest to improve the recycling system by introduction of fewer but more effective bins and an improved delimitation of the estate using friendly and educational signage and way finding systems.
Friendly Recycling
Group Four designed a system to reduce nurdle pollution in the River Itchen. It uses a bubble barrier at the river’s mouth to capture nurdles, microplastics, and nanoplastics. Additionally, sections of the system release NADES alongside the bubbles to enhance the collection and removal of these pollutants. This system is completed by introducing Micro-mist DNA to identify where spills are coming from holding businesses responsible for the pollution.
Nurdle Collective
MicroTrace is an interactive app that educates users in real-time about microplastic pollution and empowers them to take action in global cleanup efforts. By fostering community engagement, it aims to boost participation in beach and nurdle cleanups, raising awareness among local companies, councils, and governments. The app encourages users to connect and contribute to reducing microplastics, driving meaningful change through collective effort.
MicroTrace
