Planet first: entrepreneurs tackling environmental challenges

You can enable subtitles (captions) in the video player

In the tax haven of Monaco, famous for its super rich and their superyachts you can feel a very long way from pressing problems such as climate change and pollution but rubbish and global warming affect all of us. And for some contestants at this year's EY, Wolrd Entrepreneur of the Year, competition, those issues are essential to what they do.

My main objective is to generate clean spaces and quality of life. I can do anything we waste. I'm in energy, I'm in water, industrial waste, biomedical waste, oil and gas waste. And what I try to do is to eliminate and have no impact in that kind of waste in the services I provide. 50% of the urban inhabitants in Colombia, in the main cities, don't have access to water or sewage systems.

So what we're doing is bringing to them the unit portable bathrooms so they can have potable water but also sewage system. There is a relationship that has been shown that dissention in schools happens in these areas where they don't have water, and they don't have sewage systems.

We are doing the renewable energy solutions but also waste to energy solution. So you can have a hybrid system including solar power and hydro or biomass. And then you can, still in Africa, you can have your generator connected to the system.

Instead of incinerators we are gassifying all the waste fractions that can be used. And by doing that we get gases and liquid fuels. And those can be then further used for power generation.

Octopus is a London based fund management company with specialists in a number of areas, including renewable energy. We also within the Octopus group have an energy supply business which has grown over the last couple of years to about 250,000 households as customers.

Sustainability has become a really important part of what we do. I think people care about that now far more than they did in the past. But I still think change is coming too slowly. I don't see why it needs to take decades for decarbonisation to be achieved or for us to all move towards using electric vehicles. That could happen far more quickly if we can harness private capital, private initiatives, the enthusiasm of modern digital businesses to kind of disrupt things, I think that change can come about far more quickly.

We are transforming aluminium raw material into profiles, long products, as we call them. We are lucky that we are dealing with a product which is 100% recyclable. And we are taking advantage of this technology to recycle all our scrap. But at the same time, we thought that we should have the same philosophy in every product, in every aspect of our work in the company. Protecting the environment is a necessity.

It's very important to have this as a main cause of the operation.

Turning to green power it is really important. We can't continue like we are doing now. We have to save the planet somehow. And it should be important. But unfortunately still it's all about money.

Governments can only do so much. Without the enlightened support of entrepreneurs like these, we're unlikely to see much progress.