“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the planet.”
Due to steadily increasing emissions we are facing extreme weather, food supply disruptions, wildfires, and many other climate anomalies. All these changes and natural catastrophes have increased the health problems causing damages into our bodies and immune system.
In January 2015, the General Assembly of United Nations decided to put 17 different Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) until 2030. These goals are fundamental for the continuity of our planet, and it is important for us to stay aware of the challenges, in order to find the right solutions. Some of the SDG that PortXL is focused on bringing solutions are:
“Affordable and Clean Energy; Industry Innovation and Infrastructure; Sustainable Cities and Communities; Climate Action; Life Below Water; Partnerships for the goals.”
Nevertheless, it is challenging to communicate and implement the solutions from diverse assessments and backgrounds, because humans are separated into different societies, with different economic development goals, social perspectives, and environmental issues.
PortXL tries to overcome these differences by bridging between innovators with solutions and current, well-established, companies in the maritime industry. Our company has the simple aim of transmitting sustainable developments into the right destinations while interconnecting start-ups and scale-ups from all over the world.
The companies participating in the PortXL 2021 program offer notable solutions towards achieving SDGs. Discover them below.
i4sea
i4Sea forecasts the weather on near-shore. Their aim is to reduce uncertainty so nobody would be surprised by the weather and the ocean anymore. Consequently, the companies will understand the near-shore weather before taking actions and will base their decisions on these highly effective forecasts. Usually, vessels wait for hours to anchor in a port, and it creates lots of inefficiencies and fuel emissions. Most of the time these delays are related to forecasting issues. i4sea solves this issue by offering their service and forecasting the weather on near-shore and ports, leading to safer and more sustainable operations.
Techbinder
Techbinder is a company that is all about driving efficiency. Their main goal is to improve human-machine interaction by using new technologies. What inspired them to create their service is the lack of usage of data in maritime operations. Even though the technology has incorporated a lot with workers daily tasks, most of the decisions in the field of maritime are still made through experience and not through data evaluations. Essentially, Techbinder identifies the best performing worker/vessel and makes it easy for you to identify what you are seeking from your workers and which vessel is the most efficient one. Furthermore, it also pinpoints the worker/vessel that needs to improve the most.
By monitoring and identifying the workers/vessels it is possible to raise efficiency and eventually capture the problems related to work inefficiencies. When such inefficiencies are reduced, sustainability increases due to lower fuel consumption and consequently, lower emissions.
Sealution
Communication is key to understanding problems. That is what Sealution is all about. Their first patent is the Crew Safety System (CSS), an onboard safety solution for crew members. This system can alert the bridge in case of emergency or of a crewmember accident and can provide a live overview of the location. Based on their experience onboard, they have created a program that would significantly reduce the estimated time from accident to assistance from an average of 8 hours to 15 minutes.
Reefy
Reefy is inspired by nature and their innovation is for nature. Before the co-founders of Reefy Jaime and Leon met each-other, they were both following their passion for oceans and reefs on opposite sides of the world. Throughout their separate experiences, they realized that what they were doing to save the reefs was super effective, but on a small scale. When they met each other, they decided to create a system of artificial reefs to recover marine life and dissipate wave energy to protect the coastline from erosion and flooding. Their product is ecologically friendly and protects the coastline infrastructure from damages.
Clewat
Clewat Oy is focused on solving the issue of plastic waste, excess biomass, oil spills and other pollution problems of our oceans, seas, rivers, and lakes. Clewat Oy does so by using its system to pick up material waste, including up to half a millimeter-sized microplastics. The system that they use is a customized vessel that collects up to 200 cubic meter of rubbish per hour. Their mission is to make the seas plastic-free with a marine cleaning device. The device works in an environmentally friendly way by utilizing the water flow. This innovation is not only a good intention for the future but is also operating and directly contributing to the SDGs.
Seaqualize
Energy waste affects sustainability and finding a solution might be quite challenging. Seaqualize and their system is all about lifting operations in vessels and ports. Their balanced heave compensation system reduces heave motions and sets down velocities by 95%. Likewise, it has raised efficiency by reducing the waiting time on bad weather days, increasing the work time into heavy weather conditions and by improving speed and safety of set-down control. This technology leads to a reduction in energy lend, hardware cost and size, operating spend, weight and footprint.
HelioRec
HelioRec is a company that is focused on using solar energy by their floating solar panel mechanisms to provide clean energy. Their contribution to operate and help the sustainability is amazingly eco-efficient. HelioRec’s goal is to turn unused water into clean energy. They have created a system named Hydro-lock which main service is to keep water inside the floater. Combining air energy and water they produce clean energy that can be used in the maritime industry. The contribution this company does to sustainability is remarkable and it is all inspired by founder Polina’s passion for innovation and green energy.
Water Insight
Water Insight’s mission is to provide information regarding water quality. They do so by incorporating optical on-site sensors and satellite data. Their service can provide water quality data from a variety of satellites. Their operations seek to fill the gap between satellite monitoring and on-site sampling. Offering qualitative data regarding the water in ports and the maritime industry makes it easier to analyze, create a sample and reduce inefficiencies in the decision making. What Water Insight offers to the maritime industry is highly important and has the potential to reduce sustainability problems on a large scale.
Fregata Space
Fregata Space is a company that is serving a great role in sustainability and is seeking to be the next generation of Machine Learning as a Service architecture, in the new Space sector. They are prioritizing optimization, big data, and Machine Learning algorithms to transform satellite images into high-resolution information of predictive value to discover relevant patterns and solve real-world problems. Fregata Space captures observations of the abundance, spatiotemporal variation, and composition of plastics in aquatic ecosystems. Their role in decision making and plastic reduction in the maritime industry has a large potential impact on efficiency and sustainability.
LexX Technologies
LexX Technologies is a company operating in the maritime and aviation industry. They are a global business aiming to revolutionize the way maintenance works in these industries. LexX Technologies uses Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to deliver intelligent and real-time solutions rapidly to a technician device anywhere. Their company uses digital intelligence to maintain their complex equipment and to offer optimization on equipment’s uptime and on-time performances. Furthermore, the device learns from equipment and user behavior over time. Consequently, LexX Technologies guarantees efficiency and optimizations.
