HOW THE OCEAN IMPACT PITCHFEST 2020 HIGHLIGHTED THE OCEAN ECONOMY’S UNTAPPED POTENTIAL
[This article was originally published on Amplify by Ample on 21st December 2020 and written by Courtney Kruk.]
In late September, I interviewed Tim Silverwood, the co-founder of Ocean Impact Organisation (OIO), Australia’s first ocean impact ecosystem and startup accelerator. OIO was launched to help individuals start, grow and invest in businesses that positively impact the ocean, with a key focus on innovations and ventures with the potential to turn a profit.
After chartering OIO’s origin story, Silverwood shared his excitement for their upcoming inaugural event - The Ocean Impact Pitchfest 2020. Even before the event’s winners had been announced, Pitchfest had been enormously successful, attracting nearly 200 applicants from 38 countries and in many ways, validating OIO’s core mission and long-term vision.
Recently, I met the other half of OIO’s founding team, Nick Chiarelli, for a Pitchfest recap and talk through of the winners and finalists. Working as a Chief Financial Officer in his former life, Chiarelli brings to OIO a unique business perspective and a fervent desire to forge a new generation of businesses and entrepreneurs working towards a better system of capitalism. One that looks after profits, people and planet - “conscious capitalism”. It was, as Silverwood said in September, an ideal meeting of minds: “me the green, eco-guy and Nick, the traditional business man”.
Perhaps as a result of his close working partnership with Silverwood, Chiarelli now speaks with as much enthusiasm about the economic prospects delivered through Pitchfest as he does the event’s potential environmental impact, reflecting that the breadth of quality and scalable solutions received was greater than they anticipated. “I don’t know if we expected that many applications, we thought we’d maybe get 100. We certainly didn’t expect 38 countries,” he says.
“WE WERE REALLY PLEASANTLY SURPRISED BY THE OVERALL QUALITY OF THE APPLICANTS. PITCHFEST 2020 REALLY SHOWED THAT THIS IDEA OF AGGREGATING PEOPLE AROUND PASSION AND WORKING AT THE SOLUTION LEVEL CAN REALLY WORK.”
- NICK CHIARELLI
Taking out Pitchfest’s top spot and the $15,000 cash prize from Bank Australia was Planet Protector Packaging, an Australian-based business using waste from the wool industry to create insulation that replaces polluting polystyrene (EPS). Their thermal packaging solutions are currently being used for a range of products from varying industries, including cooked meals, fine wines, seafood transportation and pharmaceuticals.
Incredibly, Planet Protector Packaging has posted $14 million in revenue since launching, growing entirely without the aid of external investment. Chiarelli says this is in part due to polystyrene waste being “a very clear, well-understood problem”, while their wool-based insulation offers a simple solution and viable alternative.
“It’s not just the packaging solution either,” Chiarelli continues. “There’s the opportunity around wool itself. Wool is an excellent insulator and has a range of other fantastic properties, and Planet Protector have ambitions to bring manufacturing capabilities around wool back to Australia.”
As industries grappled with mounting COVID-induced pressures, in June, Australia’s farm lobby called on state and federal governments to support a revival of domestic wool manufacturing and processing, strengthening supply chains and regional economies closer to home. Writing for the ABC, Lucy Barbour explains “Australia used to have a thriving wool processing industry, but the majority of wool is now sent overseas to be cleaned and spun into yarn”.
Planet Protector Packaging has consequently had to buy the wool waste used in their thermal packaging from outside of Australia. “From an economics point of view, it hasn’t made sense for a while now,” Chiarelli says. “Here’s [the organisation’s founder] Joanne Howarth and Planet Protector Packaging wanting to essentially wash wool waste in Australia and get it ready to take through the manufacturing process and they can’t get that done here.
“She ends up buying waste from China and from New Zealand, which is quite ridiculous. So her ambition, other than stopping the tide of polystyrene itself, is to bring that capability back to Australia, re-shore manufacturing jobs here and help establish a part of the wool industry that’s completely gone offshore.”
Moving down the podium, Pitchfest’s first runner-up tapped into the ocean renewable energy space, taken out by Wave Swell Energy. Wave Swell Energy has developed a proprietary technology that generates clean, zero-emission electricity through a system that mimics an artificial blowhole, with the potential to use renewable wave energy to add to the energy grid mix.
The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) places wave energy under the category of ocean energy which includes all forms of renewable energy derived from the sea. This is further broken down into three main types of ocean technology: wave, tidal and ocean thermal. ARENA point out these forms of ocean energy are still “in an early stage of commercialisation”, though they’re backing Wave Swell Energy’s technology, supporting the launch of their King Island pilot project via a $4 million dollar grant.
“This is a massive validation tick for the technology itself,” Chiarelli says, explaining ARENA undertakes a thorough vetting process before financially supporting new technologies. Ocean energy has historically found it hard to compete at the grid level alongside wind and solar, though it comes into its own on a localised level providing power without plugging into the grid.
“Where it’s really compelling is for localised solutions,” Chiarelli says. “So regional communities, aquaculture desalination plants, small island developing nations. For these remote areas currently relying on diesel generators, this is a really compelling solution and very scalable.”
What Wave Swell Energy are proving with their devices and the King Island project is the ability to use wave energy to deliver smaller solutions that can aid overarching decarbonisation efforts in the future.
Chiarelli describes Wave Swell Energy’s unit as similar to that of a small to medium-sized passenger catamaran, mobile enough to be towed to destinations around Australia and eventually the world. For the King Island project, they will work with the island’s energy and network provider Hydro Tasmania, producing electricity that Chiarelli explains will further diversify the presence of renewables in Tasmania.
“We’re really excited for Wave Swell to see a successful pilot project at King Island,” Chiarelli says. “And then the hope is to create licensing opportunities where they can get the technology around the world in a variety of locations where there’s a good fit for a local, renewable energy solution.”
The final Pitchfest runner-up went to ARC Marine, an idea focusing on the preservation and restoration of marine ecosystems with “Reef Cubes”. ARC Marine’s founders connected over a shared desire to regenerate their local reefs and dive sites, which evolved into an impactful solution to an environmental problem. “They realised that to have an impact, they needed to come up with a scalable idea around this. So they did their homework and where they’ve arrived is Reef Cubes,” Chiarelli says.
“Reef Cubes are essentially a concrete block. The key difference is they don’t use your traditional portland cement mix and I believe it’s almost 100 per cent carbon neutral due to the way it’s manufactured and then the impact that it has over its lifetime and its capacity to sequester carbon via growth of organisms on the actual cubes themselves. So a fantastic piece of technology.”
As unnatural as Reef Cubes made from cement seems for the cultivation of thriving underwater ecosystems, ARC Marine has, in fact, developed a patented innovation that fosters reef stewardship and allows other businesses to positively impact the environment. The cement mix itself has been manufactured from 100 per cent recycled aggregate and sand, a marine friendly material which creates an ideal substrate for marine flora and fauna to grow and thrive.
Restoring marine habitats on one hand, they serve a dual purpose by protecting subsea assets such as monopiles, cables, foundations and pipelines on the other. “They realised just how much of an impact traditional concrete blocks and traditional methods of securing offshore structures, wind farms and so forth, were having,” Chiarelli explains. “There’s a hell of a lot of cabling and infrastructure under the water that needs to be held down somehow...Reef Cubes can be a replacement for this stuff.”
In all honesty, I’ve never considered the infrastructure required for subsea projects, nor their cost to businesses and consequent impact on the environment. After hearing Chiarelli’s explanation, I share his excitement in one of the biggest victories technology like this can have: it offers an economically viable solution for businesses, saving them time and resources, while neatly ensuring companies that don’t usually have cause to consider their environmental footprint, actually have a positive impact.
Each of Pitchfest’s finalists brought forth an idea with the potential to positively impact the environment while simultaneously providing an enormous economic and scalable opportunity. Ultimately, this is the outcome Chiarelli and Silverwood were hoping for, strengthening OIO’s long-term mission and validating their belief that the ocean economy has a strong and influential future.
“One of the key reasons we started all of this in the first place was that we surveyed the landscape and a few things stood out,” Chiarelli says. “We have all these fantastic marine organisations and research institutions in Australia, three oceans, all this coastline, and we’ve got every type of marine ecosystem that you could possibly ask for.
“Unfortunately though, there’s little to nothing happening in terms of “plugging in” early-stage innovation (...) We have so many industry bodies and scientific institutions, but very little harvesting and nurturing of passionate people with ideas that need support. And that’s essentially where we came in with OIO, to fill that gap.
“WE WANT TO GIVE PASSIONATE FOUNDERS ACCESS TO SCIENCE AND RESEARCH, AND WE ALSO WANT TO GIVE THOSE SCIENTISTS AND RESEARCHERS ACCESS AND A VIEW TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP. WE FIGURE THAT IN THE LONG TERM, NOT ONLY WILL WE BE ABLE TO SUPPORT MORE FOUNDERS WHO DON’T COME AT IT FROM A SCIENTIFIC POINT OF VIEW, BUT WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO PUSH A FEW RESEARCHERS AND SCIENTISTS DOWN THE ROAD OF COMMERCIALISATION. AND IF WE WANT TO SEE SCALABLE SOLUTIONS, WE NEED TO REALLY RAMP UP THE RATE OF MARINE SCIENCE COMMERCIALISATION.” - Nick Chiarelli
In less than a year, Ocean Impact Organisation has managed to achieve one of their core goals, building a global ecosystem of people based around a passion for the ocean and a passion for tackling the challenges it faces, combined with the opportunities it offers. The cultivation of an economy where jobs, new businesses and environmental solutions intersect and a new era of “conscious capitalism” unfolds, where profits are still realised by harnessing the environment, not destroying it. An opportunity which Chiarelli says “is just sitting there to be grabbed with both hands”.
Written by Courtney Kruk for Amplify by Ample.