Gianni Valenti is the president of French NGO Gaia First, which is an organization working to end plastic pollution in coastal communities around the world.
He’s also a dad.
And it was his daughter who inspired his biggest project — when she dropped a toy car from a balcony and broke it into countless fragments. But she didn’t see it as waste.
“I saw how she took apart every single component of the car and transformed everything — down to the smaller stickers and even rubber joints. She transformed everything into new decorative elements, robots, spaceships, and even secret agent devices,” Valenti said in a 2021 TEDx Talk.
“What I saw as waste, she saw as valuable raw elements,” he added. “That made me think.”
Valenti began to imagine the world’s billions of tons of plastic waste, often diverted to oceans and landfills and rarely recycled in a truly efficient way. He realized that if these items were reduced to the raw elements they’re made of — often hydrocarbons — they could be turned into energy.
“Most of you know that hydrogen and oxygen react together, releasing enormous amounts of energy and giving out pure water as the only byproduct, which means this is the greenest form of energy possible,” Valenti continued in his TEDx Talk.
“In fact, it is so powerful — hydrogen — that it releases three times more energy than petrol, diesel, or even kerosene. And the remaining carbon, well, we can make pencils for our kids or sustainable diamonds for our ladies.”
Trace elements of silicates and metals would also be extracted through the process, Valenti told Impakter, which would ideally be recovered in a solid state and sold to industries.
Many efforts to clean ocean trash have come to fruition in recent years — some so effective that they could clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within the next five years. They often include using large vessels to gather huge mountains of plastic pollution and bring them back to land to be effectively recycled.
But Valenti pictures a world in which those efforts are even greener.
“What if we could use that plastic to power the collection, transforming any plastic continent into a huge green energy resource?” he posed.
In fact, the process of transforming plastic waste into energy has existed since the 19th century. It’s called gasification or chemical electrolysis, and it requires a system to superheat materials at high temperatures to break them down into their elemental forms, like hydrogen.
If implemented on a boat, Valenti believes it would be possible to convert 50 tons of trash per day into hydropower, essentially creating a “self-fueling ocean cleaning factory.”
Right now, Gaia First is working with engineering firm RINA and sustainable ship design company BREEZE to bring the technology to fruition.
“In the current design, the vessel would have all the technology onboard to treat the waste, turn it into a gas and safely store it — all while at sea,” Fortune reports.
“Onboard automated processes and sophisticated sensors would sort the plastics and prepare the haul for gasification and eventual storage. In keeping with the principles of circular design, the boat would be powered by the green fuel it produces onboard.”
The tricky part is that the plastics-to-fuel process of gasification works well on land, but is still new to water.
“It’s an amazing idea,” Guido Chiappa, executive vice president at RINA, told Fortune. “But to put it into practice, you have to overcome some barriers.”
“On a boat, on the sea, you have wind and waves. It’s a very aggressive environment,” Chiappa added. “The level of complexity in order to operate a [waste-to-fuel] process as good as the kind needed for Gaia First is not as simple as what you’d find onshore.”
But RINA engineers have been working on computer simulation models to meet the challenge. Chiappa said the technology exists to pull it off — it’s just expensive. A first round of funding sought €750,000 to get the project off the ground.
“We just have to build the ecosystem,” Chiappa told Fortune.
While Fortune reported that the Gaia First vessel would lock in investments with an estimated maiden voyage of 2024, it seems the NGO is still working to fully fund its big idea.
Most recently, Valenti shared that testing has been completed to validate the whole system, meaning the actual manufacturing of the vessel can finally begin.
In the meantime, the organization leads large-scale plastic waste cleanups on land, using a multi-pronged approach to clean up our oceans once and for all.
“If nothing is done to the plastic in the high seas in the next 20 years we will see a drastic rise in microplastic presence in our bodies and all living creatures, the direct consequences of which will be strong deficiencies and mortality,” Valenti told Impakter.
Again, his daughter inspires him to keep going.
“We are talking about our future generations.”
Header image courtesy of BREEZE
