Case studies

CommunityFix.org was designed and built solo as an open-source civic-tech project. The premise: the bottleneck in local problem-solving is not a shortage of ideas but the absence of a structured, shared place to record…

Launched in 2010, the Network Rail–Samaritans partnership deployed a multi-component programme across the GB national rail network: gatekeeper-style staff training ('Managing Suicidal Contacts'), targeted work at design…

After a sharp rise in suicides on the Vienna subway following its opening, the Austrian Association for Suicide Prevention introduced media-reporting guidelines in 1987 and worked with journalists to change how subway s…

Blue LED lights were installed at platform ends across Japanese stations. Before-and-after panel data studies (14 treated stations, neighbouring and control stations, 2000–2013) reported large decreases in suicides and…

Drainage pits recessed into the trackbed beneath London Underground platforms give a person on the track survivable space beneath a passing train. Where present, they roughly halved the fatality of attempts — but by des…

Mid-track fencing at a Swedish hotspot station reduced suicides at the treated location by 62.5%, but control stations on the same rail line saw a 162% increase over the same period — the clearest documented case of geo…

Platform screen doors installed across the Hong Kong MTR were associated with a 59.9% reduction in railway suicides, with no evidence of substitution to unsealed platforms. The lower reduction compared to other cities p…

Using monthly panel data from 94 stations over 2008–2017, suicides in the Shanghai metro declined by 90.9% after platform screen doors were installed. The study found no significant evidence of displacement to railway s…

Platform screen doors were installed across Seoul metropolitan subway stations and evaluated using 10 years of monthly data from 121 stations with Poisson regression. Full-height PSDs achieved near-complete elimination…

A ~32 km solar-canopy cycle highway runs down the median of a six-lane motorway between Daejeon and Sejong. Panels are mounted as a roof over the cycle lane — angled for optimal efficiency and air-cooled — rather than e…

Along the Jinan–Weifang expressway in Shandong, a reported 68 MW corridor-integrated solar system mounts conventional panels on slopes, medians, tunnel roofs, and service-area canopies — not on the running surface. This…

Bankset Energy tested sleeper-clip PV panels at Deutsche Bahn's Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) test field, claiming ~0.1 MW per km and announcing 200 MW across 1,000 km in Saxony in 2018. No independent verification of the…

The "solar sleeper" variant of the rail PV concept: Greenrail integrates PV cells into replacement sleepers cast partly from recycled tyres and plastic (~35 t of waste repurposed per km), so the sleeper itself generates…

The first removable inter-rail PV system on a line open to traffic. In April 2025, Sun-Ways installed 48 panels (~18 kW) along a 100 m active stretch near Buttes, Neuchâtel, using a Scheuchzer track machine that unrolls…

SolaRoad opened a 72 m solar cycle path in Krommenie in October 2014 (later extended to ~90 m), operated by the SolaRoad consortium (TNO, Province of North Holland, and partners). Because the load was limited to cyclist…

Colas opened a ~1 km "Wattway" solar road (~2,800 m² of resin-encapsulated PV cells bonded onto an existing road surface) in Tourouvre-au-Perche, Normandy, in December 2016, co-developed with the French National Institu…

The most publicized test of surface-embedded PV. Solar Roadways Inc. installed ~30 hexagonal PV tiles (~13.9 m²) in a public square in Sandpoint, Idaho, funded by ~US$2.2M in Indiegogo crowdfunding plus US Department of…

In four villages of southeastern Nepal (population ~62,000, Jhapa/Morang region), where most neurotoxic-envenoming deaths occurred in the village or during transport, a study team combined community health education (di…

A counter-example to the FAV-Afrique collapse: effective, region-matched African antivenom developed and sustained through public-academic partnership rather than a purely commercial market. EchiTAb-G (ovine, monospecif…

FAV-Afrique was a polyvalent antivenom covering ~10 snake species across sub-Saharan Africa, considered safe and effective. Sanofi Pasteur halted production in 2010 (last batch made 2014, expired June 2016) after sales…

PANAF-Premium is a freeze-dried polyvalent antivenom requiring no refrigeration, with a manufacturer-stated ambient shelf life of approximately 4 years. A preclinical study evaluated PANAF and a 'Panafrican' ICP product…

Rather than develop a new product, researchers tested whether an existing polyvalent antivenom (PANAF-Premium, Premium Serums & Vaccines) already neutralizes the venoms of medically important sub-Saharan African snakes…

BRAVO was a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled phase II trial of oral varespladib-methyl plus standard care (including antivenom) versus standard care plus placebo, run in emergency departments in India (Puduc…

Researchers isolated broadly-neutralizing IgG antibodies from the memory B-cells of a human donor (Tim Friede) who had self-immunized with escalating venom doses from 16 lethal elapid species over ~18 years. Two antibod…

From 1949 to 1982, European states — the United Kingdom in large majority, alongside France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and others — sank 200,000+ drums of radioactive waste encased in resin, bitumen or cemen…

The regulatory action that ended radioactive-waste sea dumping. Under the London Convention framework, parties adopted a voluntary moratorium on radioactive-waste dumping in 1983, which was converted into a permanent, l…

The environmental-sampling arm of NODSSUM 2026, establishing the first multi-compartment baseline at the site. Alongside drum inspection, the team collected water, sediment and living-organism samples to study the dispe…

Second NODSSUM campaign (close-inspection tier): building on the 2025 AUV wide-area map, ~30 scientists used the crewed submersible Nautile to make 20 dives beyond 4,700 m onto zones of interest identified in the prior…

First NODSSUM campaign (wide-area survey tier): the AUV Ulyx — on its first scientific deployment — flew lawnmower tracks over the abyssal plain at ~6 m above the seabed, acquiring high-resolution imagery assembled into…

An open space on the edge of King's Lynn, Norfolk, was planted with around 6,000 trees in plastic tree guards, intended to create a carbon sink. Reporting found that almost all trees died. Three compounding errors were…

On 11 November 2019 ('National Forestation Day'), Turkey's government ran 'Breath for the Future,' planting roughly 11 million saplings at over 2,000 sites in a single day. At Çorum, volunteers set a Guinness World Reco…

Ecosia funds local partner organisations in biodiversity hotspots and degraded land across 35+ countries; partners grow, plant, and nurture trees through establishment. The program uses 900+ diverse native species, expl…

Ecosia (Berlin, founded 2009) earns ad-click revenue from search results syndicated via Bing/Microsoft and Google, and channels its surplus into reforestation by paying local planting and restoration partner NGOs across…

Freetree was Ecosia's browser extension that monetised online shopping via affiliate commissions (revenue paid by merchants for referred sales) and channelled proceeds into Ecosia's tree-planting programme. Launched in…

Ben & Jerry's is a counter-example to steward-ownership: a case where mission protection relied on a contract and an independent board rather than an ownership lock. Unilever acquired Ben & Jerry's for $326 million in A…

On 14 September 2022, the Chouinard family transferred 100% of Patagonia into two new entities, splitting control from economic rights:

Etsy was certified by B Lab as a B Corporation from 2012. After its 2015 IPO, retaining certification required converting its Delaware C-corporation legal form to a public benefit corporation (PBC) by a 2017 deadline. U…

Ecosia is a Berlin-based search engine founded in December 2009 that uses advertising profits to fund tree-planting and climate initiatives. In autumn 2018, founders Christian Kroll and Tim Schumacher—concerned about mi…

Ben & Jerry's was sold to Unilever in 2000. Co-founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield could not block the sale (shareholders voted to accept), so they negotiated an independent board into the share-purchase agreement w…

On 14 September 2022, the Chouinard family transferred 100% of Patagonia into two new entities, splitting control from economics. The Patagonia Purpose Trust received all voting stock (2% of total shares) via an irr…

In October 2018 Ecosia GmbH (Berlin, founded 2009) adopted steward-ownership via the veto-share ('golden share') model, with the Purpose Foundation as the independent holder of approximately 1% of shares. The founders p…

Keep America Beautiful — founded in 1953 by packaging and beverage manufacturers — ran the 1971 "Crying Indian" PSA ("People start pollution. People can stop it."), achieving enormous cultural reach. The campaign is wid…

California municipalities began banning single-use carryout bags from 2007 onward, with statewide policy following. A 2019 peer-reviewed economic analysis (Taylor, R. L. C., *Journal of Environmental Economics and Manag…

A controlled field experiment by Cialdini and colleagues at Petrified Forest National Park tested anti-theft signage on visitor paths where marked pieces of petrified wood were placed. A sign stressing a negative descri…

Texas Adopt-A-Beach, run by the Texas General Land Office, has operated since 1986 on the Texas Gulf Coast. Volunteer groups commit to ongoing cleanups of assigned beach segments, with state-level coordination providing…

Southend-on-Sea Borough Council deployed Hubbub's Ballot Bin across the town, installing 21 voting ashtrays in litter hotspots. The council reported a 46% reduction in cigarette-butt litter, demonstrating the concept re…

Hubbub deployed the Ballot Bin — a wall-mounted two-slot cigarette receptacle framed as an opinion poll — on Villiers Street, London, as the original proof of concept under the Neat Streets project. Smokers stub out in…

Ellipsis Earth deployed camera-based machine-vision surveys to provide objective before/after litter density and composition data for Hubbub's Ballot Bin and Big Ballot Bin interventions in the UK, serving as the measur…

Litterati is a citizen-science app originating in San Francisco in which users photograph litter; AI assists in tagging each item's type, material, and brand into an open database. The brand-level data has been used in…

OpenLitterMap was started by Seán Lynch in Cork, Ireland in 2017 as an open-source, open-data platform modelled on OpenStreetMap. Users photograph and geotag litter via an app, recording type, material, and brand into a…