Richard Hardiman is using drones to rid the world’s seas of trash. He faced bankruptcy and depression before the project went from prototype to profit.

Rubbish in the world’s oceans has reached critical levels that threaten not only marine life but also our own future on this planet as we know it, as fragile eco-systems are eroded.
What is already out on the seas, estimated by National Geographic to be growing by almost a million tonnes per year, is lost, but South African entrepreneur Richard Hardiman has developed a drone to catch this waste at source – the harbors and ports of the world – before it hits the ocean.rubbish in the world’s oceans has reached critical levels that threaten not only marine life but also our own future on this planet as we know it, as fragile eco-systems are eroded.
The WasteShark has been in planning and product testing stages since 2015, but is now sold globally as a drone that can clear the water of waste and help halt what is a growing catastrophe on our seas.
It has been a long personal battle for Cape Town-based Hardiman, one that brought him to the edge of despair.
But with the product in the water in a growing number of countries, including South Africa, the United States, India, the United Arab Emirates, Netherlands, Germany and Sweden, his Rotterdam-based company RanMarine Technology is primed to be a leader in this niche field.
“The initial idea was not motivated by trying to solve environmental problems,” Hardiman tells FORBES AFRICA. “I was sitting at the Waterfont in Cape Town watching these guys out in boats with pool nets pulling the plastic from the water.
<blockquote>“It irritated me that there was a lot of trash and they were trying to solve the problem with a little net. In was inefficient and you could see trash being swept out into the open ocean.”</blockquote>
Hardiman, who worked as a radio host for much of his adult life, developed the idea for a drone that could mechanize the process, either controlled from the shore or on its own as a robot in the water.
“I built a prototype, literally in my garage, by sticking some PVC pipes together and did some research on the internet,” he says.
“I taught myself how to code on to my phone and came up with a small drone I put into my pool and started to drive around. It did what it was supposed to do.”
Hardiman had no luck finding early investors in South Africa though.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2015/12/01/diving-ocean-cash/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Diving Into An Ocean Of Cash</a>
“The feedback was quite good, but if I’m honest my pitch was terrible,” he says. “In trying to raise money, the one thing I have learned is that your pitch needs to be perfect. If you cannot be precise with every answer to every conceivable question, it turns investors off.
“Although people love the environment, let’s face it, if they are putting money into it they want to see a return on investment.”
The ingenuity of the idea caught the attention of Accelerator though, a program to help start-ups based in Rotterdam. Hardiman began in the top 1,000 entries from around the world, eventually making it to the final 20 after an arduous series of interviews.
<div id="attachment_37257" style="width: 750px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-37257" class="wp-image-37257 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="740" height="494" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 740px) 100vw, 740px" />WasteShark is becoming a feature of a number of ports and harbors.</div>
He was then required to make the journey to the Netherlands for the finals and by this time had sunk so much energy, time and money into the project that the married father-of-three had nothing left to fund the trip.
“I was completely broke, I had no money left. I was taking any job I could get. I was penniless,” he admits.
Hardiman eventually found a local investor who took a punt on the project and lent him the money to get himself to the Accelerator finals.
“He gave me enough money to pay for the trip and to survive for about six months. But when I landed in Rotterdam, his cheque hadn’t cleared yet, my credit card had zero funds in it and I had five Euros in my pocket.
“Each day for a week I would walk from my hotel to the [Accelerator] event, which was about five kilometers away, sometimes in the rain and snow.
“Everybody else was so well-dressed and I would arrive in a soaking wet suit.”
But the response to WasteShark was overwhelming and he made it into the Accelerator program, which meant leaving his Cape Town-based family behind to live in Rotterdam for the next three months.
“After the three months we had done really well and we got a pilot with the Port of Rotterdam, which is the largest port in the world. They put 100,000 Euros into what would be a six-month project.”
But there would be more hurdles for Hardiman to face and the worst was yet to come.
“I fell out with the original engineering firm and brought on another partner that proved to be a disaster. It just wasn’t the right fit. By the end of 2016, I was completely out of money again and we were only halfway through development.
“I came back to South Africa licking my wounds. We had spent a lot of money and it had not really gone anywhere. In terms of investors, I found that the Dutch love innovation, but they hate risk, so nobody wanted to come into the project early.
“I went into a deep spiral of depression. I’d gone from having money to no money again. I had half a product that I needed to make work because I had a family to support.
“But I found I just couldn’t get out of bed, I really felt like I had screwed up and let everybody down.”
A chance meeting at a children’s party led to Hardiman finding a local South African investor who liked the idea of the project and could see the potential. He returned to the Netherlands.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-37258 alignright" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-300x225.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-600x450.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
“I just needed enough money to get through to June 2017 because by then we would have finished the product development stage. Then we could start selling.”
A little more than a year on and WasteShark is becoming a feature of a number of ports and harbors, and Hardiman has now moved on to the next stage.
“We sold one, then another, and suddenly it just started taking off,” he says. “We have been inundated with interest from all around the world. It’s a new position for us to be in, from the phase of trying to get a finished product out to going into production.”
Hardiman says that while they could have gotten carried away with technology on the WasteShark, the aim was actually to make the drone as simple as possible.
<blockquote>“I had this vision of a guy on Lake Malawi using our drone and when I sat down with the group of engineers to plan the product, there were many fantastic ideas about what we could do.</blockquote>
“But I was firm in my mind that we need to cater for that guy in Malawi. If a thruster is broken, he can fix it himself. It must be easy for him to operate, be simple and robust.”
Hardiman says they have numerous other versions of the WasteShark in planning and production including one that provides data on the quality of the water and another that can clean up oil in harbors. The next version will be ready September.
He adds he is most often asked what he hopes to do about the critical issue of plastic in the oceans, but the realistic goal for now is to stop the problem getting worse.
“My goal is not to solve the issue that is already out there, because that’s not realistic. It’s to stop the problem getting worse.
“If we can do that in a canal, river, marina or harbor, where most of the trash in the sea comes from, then you are starting to win the battle.”
&#8211; Nick Said

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The Man Who Sunk His Finances To Clean The Ocean

Aquaculture could be Africa’s next big thing in business. But it could also be a difficult catch.
“Before anyone goes into Africa, you need to take off the enthusiasm, take off the crazy entrepreneurial hat and get the fundamentals right, before they come back to bite you.”
This is the warning from veteran Gavin Johnston, Head of Aquaculture Consulting and Management Services, who has spent 20 years in the game across Africa. He has seen it all.
Johnston’s journey began in 1994 where he worked in South Africa’s abalone industry in Hermanus. At the time it was little more than an experiment to see if the snail-like delicacy, in high demand in Hong Kong, could be farmed on Africa shores; it grew into a million-dollar industry
“Abalone is a niche within a niche. It’s the high-end of society that wants our species. There is lots of different species. The market is complex. The price can fluctuate by as much as 200 percent depending on how it was dried or its slight color differences. With a capacity of 80,000 tons a year, [South Africa] is currently producing 1,300 tons. We are a small fry that supplies a small portion,” he says.
When it comes to aquaculture in Africa, abalone has shone. It remains to be seen if similar pilot projects such as South Africa’s Operation Phakisa, launched by President Jacob Zuma in 2014, will be as successful.
“It is looking at ways of exploiting the coastal and marine environment to create jobs. Aquaculture is there and it’s kind of the new buzzword. But here are the graves of so many failed projects&#8230; Government is seeing something interesting in that aquaculture has the ability to be seen in a remote area. It has constraints, access to markets and infrastructure,” says Johnston.
Phakisa streamlines marine-based business by creating industrial hubs. The hubs plan to cut time consuming environmental impact assessments as well as setting up infrastructure. In short, it means getting fisheries up faster and getting your legal documents signed off quicker.
The government plans to unlock the ocean economy in four areas: marine transport and manufacturing activities; offshore oil and gas exploration; aquaculture and marine protection services and ocean governance. In 2010, the ocean contributed around $4 billion to South Africa’s GDP and supported approximately 316,000 jobs. Government says the ocean has the potential to contribute up to $13 billion to the GDP and up to a million direct jobs. That’s more than twice the number of people in mining which creates more than half of South Africa’s exports.
The latest data released in the Aquaculture Yearbook 2014, by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, shows businesses in the seas are on the rise. In 2013, the value of the aquaculture sector, based on sales of products, grew by 38.1% to R696 million ($51 million). Of this, abalone production accounted for 76% of this at R529 million ($39 million). It’s a drop in the ocean compared to South Africa’s agriculture production, which was almost R188 million ($13.8 million) in 2013.
Johnston is a farmer at heart and looks like one – he wears a working shirt, shorts and shoes – and he has plenty of ideas to bring down costs. In the comfort of a coffee shop in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, on the outskirts of Hermanus, around 120 kilometers from Cape Town, we are in farming country. A hundred meters away is a farm that supplies half of the Western Cape with lettuce. On this farm Johnston is testing a new irrigation system that could produce even more. It’s a good place to muse about food, the sea and the future.
“The population is growing, [fish] catches are going down and the middle class is expanding. If you do the numbers you get a massive apparent basket of demand. That’s what’s driving the market. What’s missing is the economics behind it.”
“What people are talking about is 3,000 tons [of fish] a farm. That’s approximately 65 percent of the total wild catch of line fish in one year, in one farm.”
As we sit sipping coffee Johnston speaks passionately about a river fish in the Congo that lives off pig manure; he thinks it will feed millions of Africans by 2033. This hardy fish, called tilapia, can survive in sea and fresh water, it also feeds off algae and is cheap.
“This business is bigger than any farming operation in South Africa, and it’s a backyard operation. [African fisheries] are likely going to be lots of small guys who go and dig a dam; fill it up with water from the local river and throw in some pig manure so it goes green. I know guys who will harvest three tons a day. They have a pump; take it down to the market and just down the road, there is no ice, and they sell the whole thing. Gone,” says Johnston.
But, the rough South African seas make it difficult to farm large scale offshore.
“Most farming on large scale is done offshore, in those big fish cages. The reason is you have 100 tons of fish in one cage. You’ve got one boat that pumps feed in. The sea washes away the waste and thanks for coming.”
High density farming in tanks onshore is also a problem.
“You can have a disaster with water and in 10 minutes you will lose your product&#8230; But, the thinking at the moment [about Operation Phakisa] is there is going to be this large scale global market stuff. Whether it’s going to be the next mass production line, like chicken, I don’t know?” says Johnston.
You also need to choose the right fish to cover your costs. Farming hake, a fish that ends up on most South African plates, is pointless when it is far cheaper to catch.
“People are not going to pay R100 a kilogram for hake, and that’s the market that eats a lot of fish. The market that’s eating that nice little plate of fish, the upper tier market, that’s on MasterChef, that’s the market that will pay for the stuff. Those are the people will pay R150. So yes the equation is very nice. There are more people and there is less being caught. But there is a price point where people are saying that’s my limit.”
South Africa is a late entry into the game that has been played for centuries. It could take years before South African varieties appear on plates in international hotels.
“A lot of the fish producers have had to go big to get over that economy of scale. South Africans will only eat so much, so let’s export them. The question is to whom? Cod doesn’t exist on the international markets. They know all the international species. The Norwegian government must have spent so much money to make their salmon a dietary component of middle class citizens.”
Then there is the wild caught market, that is fish caught in the sea and not farmed, that can lower the price of your fish fillets in an instant.
“It’s a bit of a tragic assumption, because aquaculture is like any farming business. It thrives under a standard price, put a 20 percent mark-up and there’s your price. But the capture market isn’t like that. You don’t know what’s coming in tomorrow. Pilchards are caught in their millions of tons, can cost about R3 a kilogram. The cost of a kilogram of food to feed them in captivity is R20.”
Africa needs to get in on the action and one of its drawbacks is infrastructure, or the lack thereof. Johnston found out the hard way – he lost out on a $50-million cob farm in Mozambique when the gas came in.
“In Mozambique we got beaten out by oil and gas. We got there first. We got set up. It was unbelievable. The lead-up to it was amazing, and then it suddenly turned on us. The minister said that Mozambique was going to produce 70,000 tons of fish for $25 million. Then the gas came and unfortunately we were just in the same area, you can’t say no to $75 billion over the next 10 years.”
The problem in Africa is the supply chain and the local markets are few and far between, except for tilapia.
“Local markets are not going to support a high-value species. You need to build infrastructure, from roads to water, electricity to sanitation. You still need to have the same quality of high-level sanitation, whether it’s coming out of France or Djibouti.”
“Where farmers buy in seeds, in aquaculture you can’t buy eggs. You can’t just bring in seed stock. You need to have your own little hatchery, which adds its own little complexity.”
“The real nail in the coffin for most places is the regulatory requirement, intergovernmental agreements on health certifications. [Governments] just don’t set it up. [In Mozambique] everyone was ready. But the local government hadn’t done their paperwork. You can’t send [stock] out of the country. It can be as simple as your country’s veterinary authority not having done the health checks before it gets sent to Europe. Currently South Africa has the same problem. So you can farm your fish but you can’t sell them to Europe.”
Aquaculture may be a stormy business, but at least it’s in the swim.

The Buzzword That Could Change Africa Or  Crush Its Investors

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Out Of The Blue: Africa’s Water Warriors

It started 20 years ago, when farmers from a small seaside town in Africa took a sea snail slithering through the swaying kelp forests under the ocean and tried to farm it inland. They grew this small-town idea into a thriving $35.3-million aquaculture business. This is the story of abalone in Africa, reared on the shores of Hermanus, 120 kilometers southeast of Cape Town, which ends up on dinner plates in Hong Kong.
“We are lucky our species has got a very good taste, a very good texture. Our processing techniques are of a very high standard and we are able to compete with the best.”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5026" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/AbbaGold_WernerPiek_JC-1-of-11-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
So says Werner Piek, Executive Marketing Manager of Abagold, a man who grew up eating abalone long before it was farmed in Africa.
“I knew abalone since I was very small. We had a holiday house in Franskraal, just past Gansbaai. In those days there were no wetsuits, or flippers or anything like that. You had your pair of old tekkies (trainers), goggles and a screwdriver and you would go diving. In those days we were allowed to take five abalone per day. Nice big ones. On Saturdays we would go diving and bring back the abalone and cook it in a poitjie [slow cooked stew]. That was our weekend.”
In years of jet-setting between Hong Kong and South Africa, the 50-year-old Piek has adjusted his palate. Nowadays the man who started working as a factory manager in 2006, when abalone began to boom, prefers dried abalone, cooked with Asian flair.
“That’s a South African style of doing [abalone]. Asians have a very different way of eating it. It has to be whole abalone. They don’t like it minced. It’s cooked with a Chinese-style sauce, served with a piece of broccoli. They are looking for the toughness and the chewiness. South Africans want seafood with garlic butter.”
Like a good wine, abalone is as a varied as the grape. With over 100 species, of which 15 are commercial, abalone has different characteristics.
“What is the price of red wine? It depends, you have the pairing; where it comes from; what the taste and texture was; and the method it was made. From a world perspective French wine is considered the best, with abalone – its Japanese. It has the longest history of export to our main market. South Africa has been in the business for 50 years, but we have only been farming abalone for the last 15 to 20 years,” says Piek.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5024" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_1190-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />
Abalone is eaten during Chinese New Year or during the Dragon Boat Festival. It is a high-end product, used as a symbol of wealth. It isn’t, despite what people believe, an aphrodisiac.
“It is a famous gift is to give your potential mother-in-law, as a gift on Mother’s Day, to show respect. So it’s definitely not an aphrodisiac, no one wants to give their mother-in-law that kind of a present,” says Piek.
There is plenty of room to grow. The South African abalone farms account for 1% of the 120,000 tons of abalone produced in the world.
“You can’t go to Hong Kong and miss it. The branding is everywhere, on taxis, on billboards and on buildings. With all my experience I prefer the very high-end dried abalone. It produces all the flavor of the abalone. It’s not easy to prepare, it takes three to four days to cook it,” says Piek.
From the 1950s, the abalone industry went global and Hermanus was right in there; all because of canning technology making export into Asia easier.
At the time, South African commercial divers were hauling 2,000 tons per year from the seabed. Authorities realized this wasn’t going to last and introduced something called total allowable catches (TAC), restricting catches to 600 tons by 1970.
“1994 was at that stage that poaching started to pick up in South Africa. The policing around the coast became a lot more lax. People felt more freedom and felt they could take out of the sea, whereas before the police would do horrible things to them if they were caught. Also around that period, South Africa became a lot more international and the Chinese who came saw that there was abalone.”
The doors to China were open and the small-time abalone pickers tried their hands at farming. The latest data released in the Aquaculture Yearbook 2014, by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, showed businesses in the seas were on the rise. In 2013, the value of the aquaculture sector, based on sales of products, grew by 38.1% to $46.5 million. Abalone accounted for $35.3 million.
A drop in the ocean when compared with South Africa’s gross value of agricultural production which was almost $12.5 billion in 2013.
Gavin Johnston, head of Aquaculture Consulting and Management Services, who has built aquafarms over the last 20 years, says that abalone is one of Africa’s great success stories.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5027" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/AbbaGold_WernerPiek_JC-2-of-11-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />
“Abalone is a niche within a niche. It’s the high-end of society that wants our species. There is lots of different species. The market is complex. The price can fluctuate by as much as 200 percent depending on how it was dried and its slight color differences. Guys are paying $400 a kilogram.”
“It’s an interesting market, with a capacity of 80,000 tons a year. [South Africa is] currently producing 1,200 tons. We are a small fry that supplies a small portion, but it’s got a high value on the market. It’s going to be interesting to see when we there are more farms on the market,” says Johnston.
The small crustacean in the kelp forest is going to become an even bigger money maker as the years go on. Piek expects that by 2020 South Africa will produce 3,000 tons a year. It seems the dinner plates of Hong Kong can’t get enough.

The Sea Snail Business That’s Worth  $35 Million

“WHEN ALIVE, HE LIVED,” reads the memorial to FORBES’ late editor-inchief, Malcolm Forbes, on a palmshaded lawn overlooking his beloved, green-as-money Laucala Island, a 3,000-acre shoe-shaped Valhalla in the eastern Fijian islands. Since 2003 Austrian tycoon Dietrich Mateschitz, who owns the wildly profitable energy drink Red Bull, has lorded over this isolated paradise, and now he’s opened it up to people who want a taste of billionaire life.
<div id="attachment_355" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-355" class="size-large wp-image-355" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/FO011612_036-1024x469.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="217" />Take traditional Fijian architecture (timber beams supporting sea grass roofs), sprinkle with 38 pools and a dozen beaches, and add magnificent South Pacific views.</div>
Mateschitz built 25 sprawling guest villas in traditional Fijian style, with timber beams tied together to support sea grass roofs. Their connected pavilions—bedroom, bathroom and living room—encircle private pools facing the beach. I kept my sliding doors open to let the sea lull me to sleep, though civilization was close at hand with Wi-Fi and satellite TV. A light switch turned on a dozen tiki lamps, converting the place into a one-man luau.
You could easily hole up in your compound and have everything brought to you, and you might not encounter anyone even if you went out for a swim. The island has a dozen beaches and 38 pools that blend into the tropical surroundings while delivering distinctive wow factors. My favorite was a clear glass cube discreetly jutting above the beachfront like an aerial aquatic sculpture.
Serving the privileged few—this must be the world’s highest staff-to-guest ratio—are an astounding 350 uniformed attendants with an arsenal of high-powered toys from Jet Skis to shotguns. There’s a fully stocked golf pro shop on the edge of David McLay Kidd’s immaculate 18-hole Scottish carpet carved through Laucala’s dense jungles.
“This bewilderment of choices on such a small island—it’s like the Swiss Army Knife of vacation spots,” a guest told manager Maja Kilgore, who, with her husband, Thomas, runs the place with a panache that makes Fantasy Island’s Mr. Roarke seem like a slacker. “Then we must make sure to make good use of the corkscrew,” she responded, opening the umpteenth bottle from the island’s bountiful cellar to serve with yet another feast in one of its five restaurants.
<div id="attachment_354" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-354" class="size-large wp-image-354" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/FO011612_035-1024x576.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="267" />The result: luxe, Laucala-style.</div>
At 6 a.m. the day after we’d arrived, a jet-lagged friend and I decided to circumnavigate Laucala on the brand-new mountain bikes parked outside our villas. We pulled up to the gleaming white, formal Plantation House restaurant and knocked gingerly, wondering if anyone would be up at this hour. We were whisked inside like long-lost relatives, white tablecloths were laid, and a gorgeous array of local fruit appeared, along with—gasp!—just-baked croissants whose crispness I’d have trouble matching in Paris. “We have two bakers from Germany who get up early every morning in case someone drops by,” our waitress explained.
<div id="attachment_356" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-356" class="size-large wp-image-356" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/FO011612_037-1024x474.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="219" />$3,800-$35,000 per day, includes all food, drinks and activities. 011-679-888-0077, laucala.com.</div>
That breakfast encapsulates Laucala’s greatest luxury: spontaneity. Like tropical genies, the staff stays mostly invisible until you give voice to your whims. Then things happen very quickly and very well. On a single day I managed to ride a horse, grab a round of golf with resident PGA-circuit pro Tony Christie, get reinvigorated with a better-than-in-Thailand Thai massage, and water-ski around the island—with just a few minutes’ notice between adventures. By the time I’d toweled down for a late-afternoon scuba dive (thank God for the Red Bull in the minibar), magic hands had already equipped the dive boat with gear in my size and sushi to eat when I bubbled back up from the Technicolor reefs.

Tag: Ocean

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

The Man Who Sunk His Finances To Clean The Ocean

The Buzzword That Could Change Africa Or Crush Its Investors

Out Of The Blue: Africa’s Water Warriors

The Sea Snail Business That’s Worth $35 Million

The Dream Island