Andrea Lima

In countries like Ecuador, and I would say in most countries in the global south, we are facing a problem with our waste management systems.

We have limited resources to sustain innovative systems and so we get a lot of waste that leaks to the environment somehow.

We implement our patented technology called Azure directly on the river to intercept the plastic that has already leaked to waterways.

And in this way, we reduce the pollution and also avoid it to reach to the ocean, which is where it becomes a bigger problem.

Our technology has two important parts.

One is a floating barrier that captures the waste on the river.

The technology intercepts the plastic so we can take it out.

This is collecting floating plastics.

The barrier does not interfere with the natural ecosystem, so everything that has to follow the way of the river will do.

But we are collecting just the plastics in the sands.

Our technology has the capacity to recover 80 tons of plastic every day.

Gratefully, here in Ecuador, we don't have that type of pollution in rivers.

So we are collecting around between one and two tons of plastics in the rivers each month.

This allows us to understand what kind of plastics we are seeing.

Once we are collecting, we are analyzing the data.

This technology gives us data of what is the most problematic plastics that we encounter in the different places where we are operating.

And this information informs policies, informs different actions that we have to take.

And for example, in one of the rivers here in the mainland of Ecuador,

we can perceive that we are collecting a lot of textiles.

We already have studies that that knows that at the moment we are consuming microplastics that are coming inside our bodies, inside our brains and inside our placenta.