What is your company doing? HMVT is a wide-ranging environmental technology company that searches for and delivers innovative solutions for the protection and remediation of soils and the purification of water flows and air flows.

How do you clean the soil and air? We use various techniques to clean up the polluted soils. Shallow pollution can be excavated. Deeper pollutions need te treated at a different way. We are specialised in using fysical, chemical, biological and thermal techniques depending on the kind of pollution, the spreading of the pollution and the quantity.
This is the same for the treating of (proces)water and air.

Is it also possible to do the same with the water, and get rid of the plastic soup? For cleaning water you can also use these techniques depending of the kind of pollutant. If the pollutant is plastic I think you need fysical techniques, you need to seperate the plastic from the water. There are a lot of seperating techniques that can be used, for example membrane filtration, sand filtration. Seperating plastic from water is not that difficult. In the case of the plastic soup in the ocean, the circumstances make it difficult.

Did you ever had a project in connection with cleaning water? Yes. As a result of a fire at an industrial site in Amsterdam in early 2011, contaminated fire extinguishing water had flowed into nearby ditches. This fire extinguishing water was then pumped away and stored temporarily in river vessels. HMVT was asked to look into how this water could be purified with a mobile installation and how much it would cost. This involved 2400 m³ of water contaminated with a diverse cocktail of substances.
We installed an installation with a capacity of approximately 20 m³/hour. The water was purified to the customer’s satisfaction within approximately 2 weeks.

So, you are already familiar with cleaning water? Yes, I am.

Is it possible to make this part of your job, and do this more often? It is possible, but i am focussing on treating soil and air. My colleque is focussing on treating water.

Yes? That would be great, do you already have ideas about what you could do? We are not focussing on plastics. But in the last years we find rests of medicins and hormones in the wastewater. Our company is trying to treat this water and get rid of the midicine and hormone rests. This is important because the wastewater is discharged in surface water.

In the sea there are also microbeads, which are very small plastics, do you think if you clean the sea we can also get rid of these smallest particles? I think it is possible. But the circumstances and the size make it difficult and very expensive. I think you should start with the source of the pollution. Like not using plastic bags anymore. We should also not use the micro plastics anymore. The problem is not solved but it is not getting bigger and bigger.

We already thought about an idea, to get rid of all waste in the seas, including the smallest particles:
Maybe it is possible that if we create a gigantic waterproof robot fish, which only eats plastics, the microplastics will also get removed from the sea. The robot fish will have a camera in his eyes, so when he sees the plastics, he will eat it. The cameras are also made, so that the fish can also see the smallest microplastics, which we can’t see without a microscope. It will also give a vibration in the sea which we can‘t hear, but the sea animals, like a shark, can. This is because otherwise maybe a shark will eat the robot or part of it. The fish has a sensor, so we can always see where the fish swims. If the ‘stomach’ of the fish gets full, we also get a sign, and the fish is being emptied. If this works, we can make more of these fishes and place them all around the oceans.

Do you think making this is possible for your company? I think our company is not investing in this idea. Our company is too much money driven for this kind of ideas i think. There is a risk that it is not going to work. It takes a lot of time to innovate this and who is going to pay that?

Do you think this idea will work? It looks like the way a whale gets it’s food. A whale eats (drinks) a lot of water with food in it. It filters the food en pushes the water out. Your robot fish can do the same, so i think it is a good idea. You are going to need a lot of robot fish. And you have to pay attention to the kind of filters that are in the robot and the way of emptying them because i think this has te be done very often.