From a rubbish run in Papua New Guinea to the Royal Albert Hall - Shannon's story is one for the ages

Shannon Lemanski couldn’t have been happier when he won the Veolia Sustainability Award at the King’s Trust Australia Awards in 2025 for Aqua Ubique, a company that makes water from air.

But on May 11 he took it even further when, during the Trust’s 50th anniversary celebrations in London, he was announced as the winner of the 2026 King’s Trust Global Sustainability Award, making him the first Australian to win a Global King’s Trust Award.

How it all started - the wellspring of an idea

Shannon's journey to the sustainability world stage started early. Inspired by his father’s career as an engineer, he studied mechanical engineering at UNSW through the Australian Defence Force Academy before spending more than a decade in the Australian Army as a Logistics Officer.

In that role, he learned one enduring lesson.

“In the Army, when on operations or exercise, water is never just water. It’s a daily tactical and logistical issue that if you get it wrong, could have life-or-death consequences. I spent more than a decade solving that issue for soldiers, and now with Aqua Ubique, we’re working to solve that same issue for all Australians.”

In mid-2016, deployed to Papua New Guinea and responsible for the water supply of 120 soldiers, Shannon was ankle-deep in mud after a rubbish run when locals approached with a message to pass back to the troops at the barracks: please don’t crush the empty plastic bottles. Even empty, they were precious — the bottles where the only way families could collect rainwater instead of giving their children water from a contaminated creek.

Shannon didn’t forget it.

Three years later, during the 2019 Townsville floods, Shannon watched infrastructure fail in real time; thousands of Australians left without safe water for weeks.

“When the Townsville floods hit in 2019, we were surrounded by water, but none of it was safe to drink. Once again, I found myself coordinating pallets of bottled water into affected areas and thinking there had to be a better way to do this. A few years later, when I discovered Atmospheric Water Generation, I realised that the technology had the potential not only to streamline the Army's supply chain, but also deliver water security for communities across the near region.”

While transitioning from full-time service, Shannon came to understand how widespread water insecurity really is. According to the United Nations, 2.2 billion people globally still live without access to safe drinking water — and the problem is not confined to the developing world.

What surprised him was discovering how close to home the issue had become.

More than two million Australians, representing over 8% of the population, still lack reliable access to safe drinking water.

In Cherbourg, a Queensland community less than three hours from Brisbane, E. coli contamination triggered a nine-month boil water alert in 2024. Since January 2026, ongoing turbidity issues have again left the community unable to safely rely on tap water.

Bottled water is expensive, unemployment levels are high, and when tap water becomes unsafe, families are often forced into impossible trade-offs based on what they can afford. In some cases, parents are sending children to daycare with soft drinks because it is significantly cheaper than bottled water at the town’s only store.

For Shannon, it reinforced a hard reality: water insecurity is not just a problem in conflict zones or developing nations. In some Australian communities, it is already part of everyday life.

Shannon's plan to bring water to everyone

Shannon set out to build a different system that would bring drinkable water to everyone.

He sketched his first business plan the way he’d been trained; using military planning formats, mapping competitors, allies and customer segments the same way he’d once mapped a battlespace. The idea was to bring new tech to new places that needed fresh drinking water.

In 2023, he attended the FWD Fest entrepreneurship festival on the Sunshine Coast armed with nothing more than a prototype concept and a business card. That idea was to employ a technology called Atmospheric Water Generation: machines that draw humidity from the surrounding air, condense it, then filter, purify and mineralise it into clean drinking water on the spot.

The water it produced contained more minerals than bottled water, fewer chemicals than tap water, and none of the microplastics or PFAS “forever chemicals” increasingly found in conventional supply.

It was also a depollution story as much as a regenerating resources story. Every machine installed was one less truck delivering 15 litre plastic bottles, one less source of microplastic contamination, one less set of hands needed to manage the logistics of keeping an office hydrated.

It quickly became apparent that the entrepreneurs at the festival were thirsty for such a good idea and a year later, he was able to launch his first round of machines. They sold out within months.

Aqua Ubique, the company he co-founded with his wife Dannii was born.

More than profit - solving water shortages

The business model Shannon produced is as considered as the product and has far reaching impacts for communities in need. 

Through Aqua Ubique’s Drop4Drop programme, every five commercial units placed with clients — CPB Contractors, Sunshine Coast Council, Sunwater among them — helps fund one for a regional or remote First Nations community that needs it most. Each machine’s serial number is linked directly to the community unit it supports, so every customer knows precisely where their impact lands. 

In May 2025, two units went into Cherbourg: one at a daycare centre, one at an elders village, and four more have since been installed in the school across the road. Dozens of children and seniors now have access to safe drinking water who didn’t before. 

What’s coming next is bigger still. In Doomadgee, a remote Queensland community that gets cut off entirely during wet season, Aqua Ubique is building a solar-powered shipping container housing both a large-scale AWG unit and a freezer. When the roads close, the water and the meals will already be there.

Aqua Ubique’s target: forty million litres of clean water generated daily by 2032.

“Two million Australians still don’t have reliable access to safe drinking water. That’s not a developing world problem — that’s two hours from the Sunshine Coast. If this award gets more people asking why that’s still the case in 2026, then we’re well on our way to making sure every Aussie can safely turn on the tap.”

It’s a solution that mirrors our own GreenUp strategy and the commitments we have made:

• Increasing fresh water savings by 200% through advanced water recycling and new water technologies.

• Leading the world in the management of difficult pollutants — PFAS, microplastics, the invisible contaminants showing up in water supplies across the country.

• Expanding our Resilience and Adaptation offers to help communities withstand shocks (floods, droughts, infrastructure failures) of precisely the kind that Shannon witnessed firsthand.

Aqua Ubique is a grassroots version of the same conviction we hold close: that access to clean water is not a luxury, it’s the foundation of everything else.

Making a splash at the King's Trust

On Monday 11 May, Shannon walked into the Royal Albert Hall in London — where George and Amal Clooney, Rod Stewart and Rita Ora had gathered to celebrate 50 years of The King’s Trust — and was presented with the 2026 Global Sustainability Award by Benedict Cumberbatch in front of Their Majesties King Charles III and Queen Camilla. He became the first Australian ever to win a global award at The King’s Trust — a charity that has supported more than a million young people since His Majesty founded it in 1976 using his naval pension.

When asked what went through his mind standing on stage at the Royal Albert Hall, Shannon didn’t hesitate, “This award isn’t really about me. It’s recognition for the Sunshine Coast innovation community, the veteran business community, and social enterprises working to solve real problems in communities around the world. More than anything, it shows what’s possible when people rally around a shared purpose and back practical solutions that can genuinely improve lives.” 

That road to London ran through our partnership with the King’s Trust. Last year, Shannon won the inaugural Veolia Sustainability Award at The King’s Trust Australia Awards — one of only two nationally sponsored categories, recognising innovative individuals, projects and businesses making a genuine environmental or community impact. That recognition helped put him on the path to the global stage.

Shannon credits The King’s Trust Australia’s Enterprise Accelerator for helping him to turn his innovative idea into a viable business, and, through introductions, to secure his first customer.

“The King’s Trust Enterprise program didn’t just sharpen our thinking — it backed us to take action,” Shannon said. “More than anything, it reminded us we weren’t alone. It gave us capability, credibility, and connections at a stage where those three things were hard to come by — and it continues to shape how we grow.”

Veolia’s partnership with The King’s Trust Australia exists because we believe business should open real pathways; for veterans, for young Australians, for communities that have been left without something as fundamental as clean water. For us, environmental security isn’t an abstract concept. It’s the difference between a baby drinking formula and a baby drinking soft drink, because the tap water isn’t safe.

Shannon is fixing it. And we’re proud to have played a part in getting him there.

Congratulations, Shannon, Dannii and the Aqua Ubique team.