Sustainably Building the Future: Announcing the 2025 Alumni Showdown Winner

Saskia Manson

Alumni Business Showdown Competition Winner

Founder of RE:NEW

2017

Congratulations to RE:NEW! A B2B construction platform built to turn one-off reuse into repeatable practice. Winners of the first Alumni Business Showdown competition by Emerge: Be enterprising.

Alumni Showdown Competition

Throughout August, Emerge launched a new competition to help alumni entrepreneurs connect with their customers.

Intended to be more impactful than just funding; the Alumni Business Showdown was established to connect innovate graduates with a vibrant network of fellow graduate business owners.

With a prize of £1000, newly registered businesses were invited to submit a pitch that covered their business offer and model, how the idea started and the future direction for the business.

Following a tight application process with multiple innovative ideas submitted, the Emerge team are pleased to award the prize to support RE:NEW.

The judging panel were particularly impressed with the:

Strong pitch deck, compelling story and vision for the business.
Partnerships in place to launch the MVP.
Project and how it is well placed to make a tangible difference due to the scale and potential, yet sufficiently focussed to bring impact now.

I’m thrilled that Re:New has been recognised through the Alumni Business Showdown. This award provides a real boost to help us launch our MVP, and I’m grateful for the support of the Emerge team and Sheffield alumni community in helping to accelerate our mission to make material reuse in construction scalable and impactful.
Saskia Manson

Enterprising Alumni

Saskia graduated in 2017 with an undergraduate degree in Civil and Structural Engineering. A career as a Structural Engineer followed, focussing on building refurbishments, before moving into sustainability consulting specialising in the circular economy. Using this industry experience, Saskia launched her idea in 2023.

"As a child I was captivated by both buildings and nature, but as I entered into the world of construction...I found conflict between these two passions.

That is until I came across the circular economy and the waste hierarchy. I envisioned a future where construction and nature could co-exist. RE:NEW is making that vision a reality".

What is RE:NEW?

"RE:NEW is transforming the way we think about existing buildings. Right now, a building’s value is usually measured in square metres of space or the price of the land beneath it.

RE:NEW sees another kind of value, the building’s materials. Our platform is a construction reuse ecosystem: it educates on how to recover materials and design them into new projects, inspires through real-world examples, and connects through a growing supplier network to make reuse simple and practical.

By turning demolition into opportunity, RE:NEW aims to make material reuse the norm in construction and help build a future where nothing goes to waste and every material has a second life".

Sustainable Solutions

Virgin material production is only part of the problem.

11% of global emissions come from extracting and processing virgin construction materials
62% of the UK's waste stream is from Construction & Demolition waste
Currently only 1% of construction materials are reused

We provide designers and contractors in construction with the knowledge and data needed to scale material reuse in construction, through repeatable workflows, project inspiration and a connected supplier network.