New service for monitoring of environmental risks on Brownfield sites

Recycle2Trade, a digital consultancy agency supporting sustainability and waste management sectors, has signed up to the national SPRINT (SPace Research and Innovation Network for Technology) business support programme. The SPRINT project will provide Recycle2Trade with funded access to expertise from the University of Leicester to enhance the screening and monitoring of environmental sites for new developments.

Recycle2Trade is working on the development of a new service aimed at addressing challenges around the lack of reliable, frequent and up-to-date info on environmental sites such as Brownfield sites and infilled land areas. This new data intelligence platform will provide a better understanding and management of environmental risk related to Infilled Areas and Brownfield Sites via screening and monitoring the impacts linked to gaseous and liquid emissions.

This SPRINT funding will support a collaboration with a team from the University of Leicester’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, affiliated with the NERC National Centre for Earth Observation. The project will focus on analysing downscale land surface temperature data to monitor small areas such as Brownfield sites. It will use space sourced data to support high-frequency, high-resolution land surface temperature mapping through the integration of Sentinel-3, Landsat-7 and Landsat-8 data.

This project with the University of Leicester will be funded by the £7.5 million SPRINT programme. SPRINT provides unprecedented access to university space expertise and facilities. SPRINT helps businesses through the commercial exploitation of space data and technologies.

Yuri Ponzani, Managing Director of Recycle2Trade said: "Our strategy is the development of integrated solutions for the management of Brownfield sites and infilled land areas. Satellite sourced data plays an essential role in completing the suite of monitoring and assessment tools, as it provides local and landscape scale assessment of land conditions and emissions, from potentially and known contaminated sites. While convinced of the increasing role of Earth Observation datasets in any land management activity, as allowed by the increasing availability of space assets and of cloud computing platforms designed for those assets, we also record substantial demand for space sourced data by our clients.

"In the short term, the SPRINT programme is an excellent means to support the development of the integrated Brownfield sites and infilled land areas monitoring solution, as it allows access to space capabilities at the University of Leicester."

Dr Darren Ghent, NCEO Leader and Research Fellow for Land Surface Temperature at the University of Leicester added: “Satellite observations of land surface temperatures are increasingly recognised as being able to provide unique and detailed knowledge to better facilitate the understanding of man-made change. It is great to see the application of our high quality data by innovative companies to support land management solutions.”