The £1m Waste Prevention Loan Fund (WPLF) will lend businesses between £20,000 and £100,000 over the next four years.
Applicants will need to demonstrate new approaches that offer substantial resource savings approaches and can be rolled out and replicated at a national level. The loan fund is designed to help introduce solutions where commercial funding is unavailable.
The £1m funding will be distributed in phases. In the first phase, a percentage of the funding will be made available as loans to assist with cashflow for a business which is switching from generating immediate income through product sales to generating income from service delivery, for example, a company which changes its business model from selling machinery to leasing it.
Later this year, Wrap will introduce phases for other waste prevention and reuse activities in selected product categories. These will include product recovery for reuse in a closed-loop economy.
Wrap director of design and waste prevention Richard Swannell said: "We think the WPLF offers a unique opportunity for entrepreneurial thinking to make a real difference in the design and development of new products."
Applications for Phase 1 must be submitted by the end of February 2012.
Visit www.wrap.org.uk.
