The world celebrates people who are tech world’s hero, who either launched an innovative product which people think that these products will really save the world. And in most cases, such tech heroes as either dropout from Harvard or Stanford or similar. In fact, this trend is being misunderstood that those who dropout from schools will turn out to be heroes, which not essentially may turn out true.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and all others who follow, fit this bill. While that is not the case with Ruben Garcia. An undocumented farmworker and onion picker from the age of 5, who never stepped college, has innovated a remarkable solution which is currently cleaning up the shipping industry.
Now we are sure that you would be wondering what the onion picker would have done to clean up the shipping industry.
Read more!
“We can make a huge difference,” Garcia says of his company, Advanced Environmental Group, based in Long Beach, Calif. “And we want to make a difference.”
Ships are the super polluters!
Recently the Port of Long beach has witnessed monstrous containerships, where 15 such ships are estimated to pollute an equivalent of all cars put together in the world. Some reports even claim that the particulate matters from the ship’s exhaust caused 87,000 deaths from cardiopulmonary disease and lung cancer in 2012.
The world and even IMO is aware that the ships use the muck from the bottom of the barrel as fuels to ship cargoes. The recent regulations require that the ships should switch to a cleaner fuel at berth, thus the pollution levels are limited. Even at rest, a ship still emits as much diesel exhaust as roughly 12,500 cars. Here’s where Garcia’s company steps in, capturing most of the ship’s exhaust while it sits in port.
Garcia and his crew come alongside such huge ships with a barge, which has some innovative machinery which is connected to the ship’s funnel to clean up the exhaust gas. The integrated emissions-control process, which Garcia has patented, sucks more than 90 percent of the particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur oxides out of the ship’s diesel engine.
Port of Long Beach, with its strict Green Port policy, reduces pollution levels where one method is to put off the engines onboard the ships and cold-iron the ship, meaning the shore power is being supplied onboard. The thinking behind this gradual approach is that a lot of ships can’t simply switch to electrical power immediately; it can take more than $2 million to retrofit a single ship just so it can plug into onshore power.
Garcia’s technology called the Advanced Maritime Emission Control System, or AMECS, skips what’s known as “shore-side power” altogether. It takes the ship’s regular emissions and makes them nearly disappear. The AMECS idea was impressive enough that the Port of Long Beach put up a $2 million grant to help make Garcia’s first barge a reality. After more than 1,000 hours of rigorous testing, the California Air Resources Board approved the technology as an alternative to shore-side power last fall. There’s one of his barges working the entire port for now, and two more are on their way.
People in the shipping industry — including regulators — still have their doubts that Garcia’s green tech can scrub emissions from ever-larger ships. “Their first reaction is, ‘if you’re not Elon Musk, we don’t know about you, we don’t know if [your technology] works,’,” he says.
We all hailed and published various news about the biggest ship ‘Benjamin Franklin’ berthing at the port of Long Beach, where 18000 containers were unloaded from the ship with accurate precision like fitting a Tetris block game. During the ship’s port stay, where 18000 containers were unloaded in four days, Garcia offered to scrub the exhaust gas from the ship for FREE. Garcia and his lilliputian barge have handled only small ships and this one offered a lot of challenges.
The vessel owned by CMA CGM was not equipped with facilities to switch to shore power, which is why Garcia offered to pitch in with his scrubbing system. Workers connected the big AMECS hose to the ship’s exhaust, and soon enough, digital graphs on the control panel showed that Garcia’s barge, a Lilliputian compared to the Benjamin Franklin, was scrubbing the emissions clean.
Garcia, the 52-year-old never went to college. When Garcia was a toddler, he came to the U.S. from Mexico with his mother and stepfather. They went to Mettler, a tiny Central California Valley town, where he grew up picking onions alongside his nine brothers and sisters. When he graduated from high school, he connected with his biological father, who owned a small company using vacuum trucks to clean up big spills in Los Angeles. That’s where his interest in environmental services began. Till 2005, Garcia, was not a US Citizen, which had some limitations in him starting his own environmental solutions company.
Hope the story of an Onion picker to an environmental solutions business owner was inspiring! Mr Garcia should be celebrated as a tech hero when it comes to the shipping industry.
Hey, wait!
Don’t forget to rate this story by clicking on a button below.
Do you want to share such stories?
Write to use: experts@mfame.guru
Let’s celebrate people than Technology!
Source: AMECS
