The eco champ: BluePhin

Youth turn to technology to clean water trash

Three young UAE residents, enrolled in the Sharjah Entrepreneurship Centre (Pre-Seed Programme), have joined forces to set up BluePhin Technologies and utilised tech know-how to create a smart robot, Fenbot, which collects floating marine trash and monitors water quality.
"It all started with a passion for clean water. As times changed, we noticed the drastic effects of pollution in our natural water bodies and set on our quest to find a solution. We started by developing a robot that can assist in tracking pollutants in water and ended up with a smart solution to clean aquatic trash," said Simran Chowdhry, co-founder of BluePhin Technologies.
BluePhin Technologies is a start-up firm that consists of three co-founders - Simran as CEO, Irfan Vakkayil as COO and Anand E.P. as CTO.
"Our first challenge was to develop an autonomous floating robot which can analyse what kind of pollutant we are dealing with, the extent and origin. After six months of rigorous effort and hard work by a very passionate team we developed Fenbot, which turned out to be India's first aquatic robot for water quality monitoring and pollutant tracking," Simran added.
The team soon discovered that most of the pollutants were commercial surface waste such as plastic bottles, which threaten marine life, and sought to create an autonomous technology on water to clean them up. Armed with a waste basket that can fit up to 370 water bottles at a time, this solution can save up to 50 million tonnes of carbon emissions every year.
"Today, climate change is humanity's gravest problem. Our oceans are responsible for absorbing a third of global carbon emissions. This gets dissolved on the surface of the water, which if covered by waste such as plastic, our oceans will not be able to do," she said.
Now Bee'ah, one of the world's most technologically advanced waste management companies, signed an MoU with BluePhin Technologies.
"This gives us validation that technology like BluePhin's is crucial in a time like ours. They helped us understand more about the problem and the inner workings of a waste collection system on water. Sheraa and Bee'ah have been fundamental in creating the foundation of our company," Simran added.