How to make money cleaning up seas of plastic?

The starting idea is pretty simple. about save plastic floating in the sea and net that comes from broken or unused fishing nets and is recycled to give it new life. Finding him was not so easy anymore. way to make money with the process, and indeed, as often happens, their startup was marked by a bug that forced them to start almost from scratch even though they had been running for a year and a half.

As Amaia recounts, the idea to devote herself to cleaning the oceans came to her during a vacation. stay in China for two yearsHere, he devoted himself to backpacking in Southeast Asia. And especially, after almost two days of travel, a Borneo’s paradise beachIt was found filled with bottles and other debris that currents had dragged there.

The shock of this sight stamped him forever, and on his return he give good news to your family and most of all, his younger brother to lure them into the cause. Until I managed to convince him and Julen Rodriguez gave up on the project where he had to import cell phone products from China.

This yes also affected knowing in Julen’s transformation Lefteris Arapakisa Greek who will throw sustainable fishing school and told him about the amount of plastic fishermen collect. Remains caught by the nets of boats in the Aegean Sea started to go to Spain for recycling and recycling in this way.

They decided to start their company because they did not see the sea clearing from their homeland of Pamplona. calpeOn the Costa Blanca, where they spent the summers and where their uncle lived. At first they wanted to capitalize on Julen’s contacts in the phone industry, and their goal was to turn reclaimed plastic into cell phone cases. but noor something went wrong, as accepted by the entrepreneur himself.

Amaia explains that the industrial partner they found didn’t have the proper technical knowledge of plastic, so they had to abandon the idea after a year and a half of work. It was November 2020, and with “zero resources” according to the founder of the firm, rethinking the whole project and look for a new way to find income.

And what came out was to persuade other companies. get paid for to do the task, namely to clean the sea. According to Amaia Rodriguez, it was after a season where they had more than 20 meetings a week with other companies to see how they could reorient their business.

They realized that companies were looking for environmental projects to invest in Corporate Social Responsibility, but planting trees was the only thing they could get their hands on, and they started going to these meetings with proposals at their disposal until the first brave man showed up. the idea from them and for the first time in December 2020, They started to bring money.

In this way, companies contracting the service pay an amount, and in return Gravity Wave confirms that the corresponding volume of plastic has been collected from the sea. For example, Nestlé’s new vegan tuna brand has committed to removing 14,500 pounds of plastic this year, and more and more companies are committing to the initiative.

For its part, the starting amount Agreement with 4,000 fishermen From Greece, Italy and Spain they are also placing containers in ports so that boats can pile up nets that no longer serve them, thereby preventing them from falling to the seafloor.

All these materials are then sent to a factory in the province of Valencia, where they are turned into plates. they make benches, planters, bins and other types of street furniture sold at the same time become a second source of income for the company.

Now they are looking for a new partner who will also do injection molding to expand their product range and be able to process larger volumes of material. The big goal they have set for themselves is to reach one million kilograms of recycled plastic by 2024. They are on the right track for now.