OREANDA-NEWS. National Grid has launched a UK competition among its suppliers to come up with innovative ideas to make their products greener.

It is the first initiative to come out of the company’s successful inaugural sustainability summit, which was held in September last year.

The summit attracted more than 300 people from the company as well as Government, regulators, suppliers, customers and community groups.

Based on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation-backed concept of the ‘circular economy’, the supplier design competition encourages suppliers to operate a closed loop approach to the supply chain and to redesign products for reuse, disassembly and remanufacture.Top prize will be a three-year membership to the Circular Economy 100, a new programme by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to help businesses make the move to a circular economy.

The CE100 – which was launched earlier this month – is a platform for 100 pioneering businesses to accelerate the transition to a circular economy over 1,000 days.

The competition begins today, Monday 18 February, and closes at midnight on Monday 3 June.

Jon Carlton, Director, Project Lead said: “We are passionate about turning today’s waste into tomorrow’s resource using circular economy principles.

“Not only is this the right thing to do for the environment, but it can lead to a more cost-efficient way of working, as the price of commodities rises in response to the growing global demand on finite natural resources.

“We can’t achieve this transition to a circular economy alone, and to encourage novel, innovative thinking in this area, we have developed this Supplier Design competition, which we hope many of our suppliers will be inspired to enter.”