Entrepreneur Kate Barnard from Nailsworth is turning the air green with an innovative new business venture.
Enjoy The Air – the business she co-founded in 2020 – supplies data and analytics to help UK cities reduce air pollution, as well as providing them with sustainable growth plans.
“Poor air quality causes adverse effects for the environment and for human health,” Kate says. “We established Enjoy The Air to help cities improve air quality to a degree that is increasingly required by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and needed by local people.”
It’s not the only way that Kate is ahead of the curve. As a female engineer working in a male-dominated industry, she’s part of the 0.2% of female Fellows of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
Now she and her Australian-based business partner, Errol Kruger, have received a £25,000 start-up loan from the British Business Bank via SWIG Finance, a not-for-profit social enterprise based in the South West.
The loan has been used to create a new certificate, HALO, recognising and rewarding cities that meet stricter WHO air quality targets, and set up a peer-to-peer learning platform to help other cities avoid having to pay the penalty fines.
Enjoy The Air will soon have an international focus, creating a set of guiding principles to help other countries, including Australia and America, improve their air quality credentials, too.
“We’re also planning ‘Air Rated’, an authoritative source on the composition of the air in UK cities,’ Kate says. ‘Data on biodiversity, land-use and even water quality are too often masked for the sake of a positive spin. The data we provide will be a true indicator of community wellbeing and underlying prosperity.”
Enjoy The Air now employs five people and plans to expand as the business grows.
