Part 5 - What a Billionaire's Checklist Can Teach Us About Fixing Net Zero: The Startups Making It Easier

Article four in this series set out twelve concrete actions available to the UK public across energy, food, health, nature, and transport. None of those actions require government to move first or a company to build anything new; the grants, schemes, and volunteer programmes already exist.

What is less visible is the layer of businesses working specifically to make each action easier to find, faster to complete, or more likely to actually happen once someone decides to try. This article maps that layer, pillar by pillar, and closes with four gaps in the current market that a founder could still fill.

Energy

For buying a home solar package from a supermarket, the friction point is less about finding the product, plug-in kits and full rooftop systems are now genuinely on shelves and online, and more about knowing which of dozens of near-identical-looking kits actually suits a given roof, budget, and electrical setup. EcoFlow, the Shenzhen-founded portable power company behind most of the plug-in solar kits now sold through Amazon UK and shortly through Lidl, B&Q, and Currys, reached unicorn status on a $100 million-plus Series B led by Sequoia China at a $1 billion valuation in 2021, and is reportedly now working with investment banks on a US listing targeting at least $300 million (TechCrunch; EnergyTrend). For the full rooftop route, SolarForYou, a London-based comparison platform, lets homeowners enter their property details once and receive up to three free quotes from vetted MCS-certified installers rather than approaching each supermarket or retailer's in-house scheme separately (SolarForYou).

For buying a stake in a local solar or wind project, Thrive Renewables, hosted on Triodos Bank UK's FCA-regulated crowdfunding platform, has raised over £70 million to date to fund wind, solar, hydro, storage, tidal, and geothermal projects, six of which are community-owned, with its most recent 2026 bond offer raising £7 million including institutional investment (Triodos Bank UK; Thrive Renewables). Energy4All runs regular share offers letting ordinary people become members and investors in renewable energy co-operatives across the country (Energy4All).

For starting or joining a community energy group, Community Energy England's Energy Learning Network has produced open-source planning tools including VoteWind, a community wind site-suitability mapping tool, and the Solar Wizard for building-specific rooftop solar estimates (Community Energy England). Younity runs a free platform called Community Energy Connect designed to help would-be members find others in their area and access courses on finance and legal basics (Younity). Great British Energy has signalled a forthcoming "Community Energy in a Box" toolkit and Local Energy Platform, expected to mature through 2026, which would standardise the paperwork this entire category currently runs on (GOV.UK).

Food

For giving away or collecting surplus food, Hubbub coordinates the UK's Community Fridge Network, now over 700 fridges strong, each redistributing between one and four tonnes of surplus food a month, with £3 million in funding from Co-op to expand further (Hubbub; Resource). OLIO, the London-founded hyperlocal food-sharing app, had helped rescue 120 million meals through more than 150,000 trained volunteers by its 10-year anniversary in 2025, and in 2026 launched a national surplus trial with Lidl GB targeting over 5,000 tonnes of food annually (OLIO; Retail Tech Innovation Hub).

Neighbourly, based in Bristol, connects businesses including M&S, Sainsbury's, and Tesco with over 45,000 vetted charities and community groups, with M&S alone donating over 70 million meals through the platform since 2015 (Neighbourly; M&S). FareShare, using FoodCloud's notification technology, has saved over 24,000 tonnes of food and provided an estimated 57 million meals through a network of thousands of charities (FareShare).

For cutting back on meat, THIS, the London-founded plant-based meat brand behind This Isn't Bacon and This Isn't Chicken, has raised roughly £35 million since 2019 from institutional and crowdfunding investors and became the UK's third-largest meat alternative brand last year, giving anyone trying Veganuary or simply eating less meat a familiar supermarket product to reach for rather than a from-scratch recipe (The Grocer). Meatly, a London cultivated-meat startup, raised £10.4 million in a Series A round in May 2026 to build what is described as Europe's largest cultivated meat facility, aiming to bring lab-grown meat that behaves like the real thing to market at scale (StartupMag).

For growing food in a shared space, AllotMe, described as "Airbnb for gardens," matches people with spare outdoor space to people wanting to grow food, addressing allotment waiting lists reported as long as 40 years in parts of London, and has raised seed funding including £250,000 toward its marketplace (London Post; MyLondon). Lend and Tend has run a similar garden-matching model since 2014, reinvesting half its profits into the communities where garden-sharing takes place (F6S). Landmatch England connects people seeking land for small-scale agroecological growing directly with landowners through personal introductions (Landmatch England).

Nature

For tree planting, both the volunteer-day and grant-funded routes, Glafos launched an AI-powered assistant called Grant, designed specifically to simplify applying for tree-related grants covering woodland creation, hedgerows, and agroforestry in England, one of the few tools targeting the funding-navigation friction point directly rather than the planting itself (Farming.co.uk).

Earthly helps land managers access funding for biodiversity and tree-planting initiatives and has raised a further £1.2 million from institutional investors after an overfunded Crowdcube pre-seed round (Earthly). TCV's "I Dig Trees" is the UK's largest community-led tree-planting programme, matching corporate and community funding from £3 a tree with local volunteer planting days (TCV).

For recording wildlife, iRecord, iNaturalist, and Mammal Mapper remain live and active, with sightings checked by experts and fed into national recording schemes (iRecord; NatureScot). The British Trust for Ornithology has since launched "Birds in Greenspaces," a newer UK-wide app asking the public to record which birds they see in local public-access green spaces (Google Play).

Transport

For the electric car grant, Electrifying.com is a UK EV comparison and buying-advice platform whose website, YouTube, and social channels attract 2 million monthly visits combined, offering grant and incentive guidance alongside vehicle reviews (Electrifying.com).

For funding a home charge point, CertifiedInstaller.co.uk is a directory of OZEV-approved installers built explicitly around grant access, letting users claim the government chargepoint grant, up to £500 or 75 percent of cost, directly off the invoice on any booking made through the platform (CertifiedInstaller.co.uk). From April 2026 those chargepoint grants rose from a maximum of £350 to £500 per socket, with applications for renters, flat owners, and landlords moving to a new government platform the same month (GOV.UK).

For the subsidised e-bike, Green Commute Initiative, established in 2016, differs from Cyclescheme mainly by having no £1,000 spend limit, making it suited to pricier e-bikes and cargo bikes, and no end-of-hire ownership fee, with employees saving between 28 and 48.25 percent depending on tax rate through more than 1,300 partner bike shops (Green Commute Initiative; BikeRadar).

Four gaps worth building

The research behind this article surfaced the same friction point recurring across all four pillars: fragmentation. Multiple narrow tools exist per scheme or per technology, but almost nothing spans them. Four specific gaps stand out.

A single grant-and-scheme eligibility passport for home decarbonisation.

SolarForYou and similar comparison sites check eligibility and match quotes for solar specifically. CertifiedInstaller and ecoHarmony check eligibility for charger grants. Nobody appears to check a household's eligibility once across solar, heat pumps, EV chargers, insulation, and community energy investment simultaneously, then route the household to the right scheme, retailer, or installer for each. A one-form, all-grants passport would remove the repeated-form fatigue visible across almost every energy quote-matching platform reviewed.

A hyperlocal, household-to-household surplus logistics layer for rural and small-town areas.

Neighbourly, OLIO, and FareShare are all built around business-to-charity or business-to-volunteer logistics at meaningful scale, and community fridges rely on a fixed physical location. Nobody appears to solve the last-mile problem for a household in a rural or low-density area that wants to give away a garden glut or a batch-cooked surplus directly to a neighbour, without a fixed fridge nearby or enough density for an OLIO-style match. A lightweight, message-based micro-logistics layer purpose-built for rural household-to-household surplus looks like a genuine, underserved niche.

A combined grant-and-land-matching engine for tree planting.

Glafos's Grant tool is a promising first mover on grant navigation for landowners who already have land. Nobody found in this research combines that function with land-access matching, in the way Landmatch England or AllotMe do for growing, so that someone with funding eligibility knowledge but no land of their own could be matched to a landowner wanting trees planted under a specific scheme such as the England Woodland Creation Offer. This matters because tree-planting grants are fragmented across Defra, the Forestry Commission, and multiple charities, and most consumer-facing tools focus on the awareness end of tree planting rather than helping someone secure land and funding to plant at scale.

An independent, cross-scheme EV total-cost-of-ownership calculator.

Separate tools exist for vehicle grants, charger grants, and salary-sacrifice leasing, but no single independent UK tool combines all live layers of support, the Electric Car Grant discount, chargepoint grant, salary-sacrifice tax treatment, and regional top-ups, into one personalised comparison against an equivalent petrol or diesel car. Because eligibility criteria and grant amounts have changed multiple times through 2025 and 2026, the real friction point is no longer whether an EV is affordable, it is working out which of several overlapping schemes actually apply and how much they add up to.

None of these four gaps require new government policy or new public funding. They require someone building the software layer that stitches together support that already exists, which is precisely the kind of business the twelve actions in article four could use more of.

Sources cited inline above via TechCrunch, EnergyTrend, SolarForYou, Triodos Bank UK, Thrive Renewables, Energy4All, Community Energy England, Younity, GOV.UK, Hubbub, Resource, OLIO, Retail Tech Innovation Hub, Neighbourly, M&S, FareShare, The Grocer, StartupMag, AllotMe, London Post, MyLondon, Lend and Tend/F6S, Landmatch England, Glafos/Farming.co.uk, Earthly, TCV, iRecord, NatureScot, BTO/Google Play, Electrifying.com, CertifiedInstaller.co.uk, and Green Commute Initiative/BikeRadar.