Every year, millions of people from all walks of life trek to waters considered by many to be the most sacred in the world, those of the Ganges River. During pilgrimages, souls bathe in the river in hopes that, through the execution of the ritual, the hand of the divine will touch them in some way. In a few years, we’ll see this play out through the Hindu pilgrimage of the Kumbh Mela festival, which will take place in Haridwar along the river.

Sadly, despite how much these waters mean to so many, the Ganges River is now one of the most polluted in the world. Over time, agricultural runoff, sewage, and industrial waste have taken their toll… even for those with only a functional relationship with the water (drinking and farming, for instance), this is bad. It threatens the very ecosystem that depends on the river. Even sadder, more waters are becoming like this.

Among those working on solutions is a company deploying autonomous robotic vessels specially designed to pull biomass, oil, and plastic pollutants from water. The company is called RanMarine Technology, and they’ve scaled their venture up enough that they’ve decided it’s time for an IPO. This Dutch company will list on the Nasdaq and, technically, the robots are called autonomous surface vessels (ASVs).

While these aquatic drones do function to clear pollutants, they do something else really important: data collection for accuracy and constant improvement. Customers already working with the solution are entities like oil and gas companies, ports, and water treatment plants. Founded in 2017 by Richard Hardiman and Anton Hemelaar, the company’s investors include InnovationQuarter, Boundary Holdings, and EIT InnoEnergy.

Using robots to clean water seems to be catching fire… a guy named Michael Arens is making his dream of ridding the oceans of plastic pollution a reality by building a company called Clean Earth Rovers. He founded the company in 2019, and it is already turning heads. More specifically, Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Awards heads. Seems Arens has put together a whip-smart group of folks for this project.

Recently, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems were able to successfully demonstrate a jellyfish robot that can clean pollution from water… another unconventional robot idea being floated as a saving grace. While that may sound a bit silly, we’ll remind everyone that we’re in a spot of needing to innovate to handle microplastics. Strange, aquatic technology could help.

If you’re familiar with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, you won’t be shocked by what you’ll read next. If you’ve never heard of it… brace yourself, they don’t call this thing “great” for nothing. We’re talking about a patch of garbage in the ocean estimated to be twice the size of Texas, and this monstrosity floats along somewhere between Hawaii and California. The latest cleanup haul from crews working the patch report 55-tonnes collected over six-weeks… that’s almost unfathomable.

Besides robots, there are other ideas in the pipeline for cleanup efforts, like the Ocean Cleanup Array. This large-scale system of floating barriers is still in development, but the exact aim for the Ocean Cleanup Array is to be able to help clean the garbage patch in the Pacific… to keep it from acting like The Blob, swallowing up more of our beautiful ocean.

The small, floating device will collect debris and trash, and will work well in places like ports and harbors. Solar-panel-powered, the machine surfer trash collector will have an appetite for up to 1.5 cubic meters of waste a day. Ultimately, it’ll be similar to a waterwheel powered device, called the Mr. Trash Wheel, already in use and busy cleaning the Baltimore Harbor (he’s been a busy fella, 200 tons of trash collected since 2014).

But… what if we could get even more granular than microplastics? As in, CO2. This is the vision of Caltech-related startups, Calcarea and Captura. These tiny little companies are in the business of carbon-sequestration, but they aren’t looking up, all their eyes are on water. The way they see it, not enough people are working on pulling carbon out of the oceans, and they want to change that.

Sick of sitting by while the oceans need help, they’ll engage in ocean carbon cleanup through direct removal and cleaning flue gas from cargo ships. Most efforts in sustainability, at least thus far, have not been heavily focused on shipping. Startups like Calcarea and Captura will aim their spotlights here, which helps us with a more holistic sustainability approach. Come back next week… we’ll have more from the IPO space.