A team of young entrepreneurs who invented a new way of recycling drinks cartons are £150,000 closer to turning their research project into a commercial venture after winning the final of the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs’ business creation competition.

At Friday’s final, post-doctoral researcher Carlow Ludlow-Palafox and PhD student Alex Domin from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Emmanuel College successfully talked six of the city’s leading business angels and entrepreneurs into giving their business EnvAl £150,000 of start-up funding.

EnvAl, which began life as Dr Ludlow-Palafox’s PhD project, is developing a new technology for recycling the millions of Tetrapak drink cartons thrown away every year. Its new process extracts usable aluminium, oil and gas from the cartons, so that they can be completely recycled rather than thrown away.

EnvAl is also gaining vital commercial expertise as the 'angels' – who include Acorn Computers and ARM co-founder Hermann Hauser, telecoms guru David Cleevely and serial bioscience entrepreneur Andy Richards – have agreed that one of them will join the board of EnvAl to help steer it through its early stages.

There were two other winners of the £50K Competition, BOPPHY Technologies and Cambfix. BOPPHY Technologies, led by students based at the Computer Laboratory, is developing new technologies for delivering extremely high-speed broadband internet access over powerlines – particularly useful in rural areas and / or in developing countries where there are many more power lines than telephone lines.

The third winner was Cambfix, a fledgling business headed by two students taking the CMI-sponsored Masters programme in BioScience Enterprise. Ali Bajwa is an orthopaedic surgeon who has spent eight years mending broken wrists and ankles. Cambfix has invented a series of new products that can fix serious fractures without having to drill pins into the bone and which, unlike a plaster cast, allow the patient to keep the joint mobile so it doesn’t stiffen up.

The £50K Business Creation Competition was set up at the University of Cambridge in 2000, inspired by the highly successful $50K Competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since then it has distributed more than £200,000 in prize money and spun out more than 18 companies headed by students and other University members, with the support of sponsors including the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI), the Cambridge Science Park and ARM.

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