See our showcase of innovative projects and entrepreneurs who are shaping the Blue Economy.
Projects consist of innovative, scalable and sustainable business ventures from traditional and emerging sectors of the maritime economy.
The graphs below provide an overview of the country distribution, sector, and TRL of projects currently listed in the BlueInvest Project Pipeline.
Selection Criteria:
Your company is EU-based or from an eligible sea basin region (Georgia, Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova, Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Mauritania, United Kingdom, or Norway)
Your project TRL is 4 or higher
Your project sector is in one of the 10 blue economy sectors identified for this initiative
Your solution has a clear sustainable impact on the blue economy
Your project is looking for investment
Country in which the project is being developed and / or implemented.
Main blue economy sector the project relates to.
Current technology readiness level of the project.
Healix
Marcel Alberts - Founder and CEO
Marcel has been active in the fiber and technical textile industry for almost two decades and is well aware of the necessary changes. The idea derived from Marcel‘s intention of improving the fiber sector’s sustainability. As Managing Director of a leading industrial and high-performance fibers supplier called FibrXL, Marcel organized a hackathon named Project Helix. This was a 24 hours event where industry partners met to tackle challenges related to sustainability and circularity in the technical textile and fiber industry. The event was summarized in the quote ‘Stop talking, start doing’. This sparked the idea to take action and create a new start-up called Healix. Healix was founded in 2021 by Marcel Alberts who has a long-lasting career and the technical textiles industry and a proven track record in building new businesses from scratch.
Stefan Becker - Operations Manager
Stefan has a background in Mechanical Engineering and worked at DSM Protective Material (the former Dyneema), during his time at DSM he learned a lot about yarn/fiber processing, fiber-based end products, or applications such as nets and ropes for the maritime and offshore industry.
Jeroen van Goor - Sales
Jeroen is accountable for the open-loop sales at Healix and has a lot of experience in the plastic and recycling industry. He worked at SABIC, QCP, and SUEZ before starting to take on the sales at Healix. Having worked in an all-around industry environment (from waste to virgin) Jeroen understands the – large – differences that currently exist between these worlds and learned how to connect them. Marcel Alberts approached Jeroen in 2021 because he needed someone to develop an open-loop business for his recycled fiber-based polyolefins.
Nets and ropes from fishing and farming (HDPE and PP) are often either dumped in ecosystems endangering wild life and spreading micro-plastics or being burned increasing CO2 pollution because their is no recycling capacity or technology to take care of this plastic fiber waste.
In the meantime new nets and ropes are made from virgin oil which increases the amount of fiber plastic in the wolrd that has no where sustainable to go after use, and additionally emits CO2 in the process of creating fiber plastics.
Healix solves these problem by offering a sustainable "end-of-life" solution for discarded plastic fiber waste which is recycling this material into recycled high-quality polymers that can replace virgin polymers. This mean they can be used for new nets and ropes and therefor enable companies in these sectors to buy recycled polymers and enter the circular economy.
Calculations show that within 5 years more than 120,000 tons of CO2 will be saved compared to the production of new polymers, this amounts to 24,000 tons of CO2 per year. Healix strives to emit zero CO2 and is therefore currently investigating all possible options to achieve zero emissions from the recycling of plastic fiber waste. A conscious choice has been made to invest in machines that are the most sustainable in terms of energy consumption.
Essentially, the techniques by which Healix recycles plastic fiber waste already exist, however, the combination and sequence of machines used to recycle plastic fiber waste into high-performance polymers is unique. At the moment there is no other company in the European market that can recycle plastic fiber into high quality polymers that can be used within the technical textile industry. By doing so, Healix offers its customers/users the possibility to choose recycled plastic as a raw material for new products instead of 'virgin' plastic that is made from oil, releasing a lot of CO2. There is already more than enough plastic on our planet, our plastic industry needs to be changed and we need to start seeing used plastic as a raw material and no longer as waste.