FILIPINO entrepreneur and environmentalist Mariano Jose Diaz Villafuerte IV, CEO of CypherOdin Inc. and cryptocurrency BOTcoin, wants to clean up the world’s rivers and seas with blockchain, a distributed ledger platform (DLT).
Villafuerte has identified the 27-kilometer-long Pasig River, as his firm’s first proof of concept (POC). The river is one of the dirtiest and most heavily polluted rivers of the Philippines.
“We first came up with the idea of showcasing how blockchain technology can solve real-world problems and clean up the environment specifically, using Boracay Island [a worldfamous tourist resort island in central Philippines] as an example. However, the government shut the island down in April, so we looked at the Pasig River instead as the next most important body of water in the country,” Villafuerte said. He explained how his company plans to install Internet of Things (IoT) devices on the river and underwater (IOUT) to monitor water quality or tide levels and other relevant data to track and monitor their progress in real time. This will enable them to generate and analyze the data produced that will serve to create the impact they are looking for toward solving the plastic and garbage problem that silts the river.
For even more utility, he said CypherOdin would be using drones to map the plastic using Lidar on a microscopic level. “We will collect all the data we gather from these IoT and process them so we will have comprehensive information on where the plastics and garbage are coming from, how they are moving, among others. This would allow us to analyze and come up with recommendations on how to best cleanup the rivers of this debris,” he added.
But as part of its holistic approach, Villafuerte said they also plan on launching a massive information drive, particularly to communities along the riverbanks and near the river about the importance of proper garbage disposal and how to protect the environment.
The communities, he said, would be incentivized with BOTcoin cryptocurrency for a certain amount of garbage they collected on the river and for not throwing plastics on it. BOTcoin is the first digital currency which aims to create a world free of waste and restored to its pristine state
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How about getting a real solution for the San Juan and pasig river cleanup and begin a fundraising campaign to build a unit to extract the garbage