The Business School of Mondragon Unibertsitatea-MIK identifies business opportunities for the Basque Country in the marine plastics sector
The Business School of Mondragon Unibertsitatea-MIK identifies business opportunities for the Basque Country in the marine plastics sector
The Business School of Mondragon Unibertsitatea-MIK identifies business opportunities for the Basque Country in the marine plastics sector
The aim is to place the Basque Country at the forefront of the emerging blue economy sector
The world production of plastic materials exceeds 348 million tons per year. Of these, 12 million tons end up in the oceans every year. According to a 2020 report by the McArthur Foundation, annual discharges into the sea - mainly plastics - are expected to exceed 29 million tons by 2040. The situation in our environment is no better. On the Basque coast there are more than 50,000 tons of marine and river plastics. If we do not act, it is very likely that by the year 2050 there will be more plastics than fish in the oceans due to increasing human discharges into the sea.
Faced with this desolate panorama that endangers the planet's last reserve for Humanity, two Basque maritime associations, Itsaplanet from Getaria and Itsasgela from Pasaia conceived and activated in 2013 the Ecofish project aimed at raising awareness of marine dumping and developing a new recovery strategy to clean up the seas by creating employment through the activation of a new socio-economic sector associated with the new concept of Blue Economy.
This is an emerging sector, which seeks to prevent dumping and recover and recycle marine waste in a new circular economy system, which has been called the Blue Economy. And the Basque Country has great potential to position itself at the forefront of the new sector, given its abundant raw materials and its industrial and technological potential. The data support this. According to a recent UN study, the emerging Blue Economy already employs more than three billion people, representing 5% of the world's GDP. And according to the European Commission, the Blue Economy represents 5.4 million jobs and a gross value added of almost 500,000 million per year, although it may employ up to 7 million people in the next decade.
Ecofish study
In this global context and taking into account this emerging blue economy, the Basque Government's Departments of Fisheries and Environment were invited to co-finance a Study of Business Opportunities in Marine and River Plastics, which last year 2020 was prepared by the MIK Technology Center-Mondragon Unibertsitatea Business School and whose results of the first phase were presented today at a conference in Bilbao Berrikuntza Faktoria, and which was attended by the Basque Government's Deputy Minister for Environmental Sustainability, Amaia Barredo, among other speakers from Basque companies and organizations, who dealt with subjects such as the problem of plastic pollution on the Basque coast, the opportunities of the emerging market for fishing and the reuse of marine plastic or the new demand for recycled plastic in Basque industry, as well as the results of the Ecofish Study.
The first phase of the Ecofish Study was carried out during 2020, where niches of business opportunity have been identified around marine plastic in the Basque Country, for which both international technological and business trends, as well as projects in the Basque Country have been analyzed. Fourteen entrepreneurial projects have been prioritized for implementation in the short term from the entire value chain: from the identification of plastic, its recovery or fishing, transport of waste, selection and cleaning, processing, distribution and placing it on the market.
As explained by Mondragon Unibertsitatea Enpresagintza-MIK "it is essential to activate a new value chain involving in the process all those agents capable of identifying and recovering marine plastic (advanced service companies and fishermen), all those capable of transforming this marine plastic waste into a new resource (technology sector and recycling sector) that can be reused as raw material in various industries (e.g. Packaging, Construction, Automotive, etc.). Also, raising public awareness of this situation is essential to minimize such dumping from preventive actions".
The Ecofish Study is thus an important opportunity to position the Basque Country at the forefront of this new emerging sector, the blue economy, "because it has abundant raw material, industrial and technological potential with the capacity to compete in the new market, and the talent to imagine and develop solutions that can be a reference in other latitudes", as explained by Enpresagintza Mondragon Unibertsitea-MIK.
Deputy Minister Amaia Barredo stressed the importance of "participating in projects such as ECOFISH, advancing and deepening research, innovation and entrepreneurship" with the aim of "involving civil society in the search for solutions to alleviate marine and river pollution, aligned with the other measures that the Basque Country is taking to make the recovery and reuse of existing waste in the marine environment an attractive activity as a business model and generator of companies and employment". In this sense, the Basque Country is planning different measures and actions that will be incorporated in the New Waste Plan 2030. Among these measures is the establishment of a system to monitor marine and coastal pollution by macroplastics and microplastics, or the study of the recycling of plastics recovered from the sea and coast.
New companies
Ecofish has already contacted more than 30 companies and entrepreneurs who have been sensitized to become promoters of these new lines of business identified along this new value chain, which will possibly lead to the generation of new technology-based companies and new jobs. For its promoters, it is therefore a project that allows the private sector to activate a new value chain that complements public actions aimed at solving the environmental problem of cleaning the rivers and sea of the Basque Country of plastic waste.
In addition, the necessary support mechanisms have been identified for the projects. These accompanying mechanisms designed by Enpresagintza Mondragon Unibertsitatea-MIK have been organized through activities that will be attended by promoters of the different projects, together with others that are specific to each project, thus ensuring that the sense of new value chain and the community/ecosystem of promoters formed, is not dismembered in disconnected individual projects.
Thus, the involvement of MIK of Enpresagintza-Mondragon Unibertsitatea in Ecofish guarantees the application to the new marine plastics sector in the Basque Country of a methodology that has already been successfully tested in the conceptualization, design and development of business ecosystems in both Bilbao Berrikuntza Faktoria (social innovation) and Bilbao AS Fabrik (advanced services for the digital transformation of Basque industry).