About

Reelease is a cleantech startup with the goal of aiding the maritime sector into becoming a more sustainable industry. Focusing on maritime operations, we have found that several ancillary plastic products are not being disposed in a sustainable manner once they reach their end of life. Prime examples include mooring ropes and fishing nets, which come with technological as well as logistical challenges when it comes to their sustainable disposal. The lack of interest from companies to take on this challenge has led to harmful disposal of such products through land-filling, incineration and even sea-dumping. Additionally, tight regulations on legal rope conditions result in excessive amounts of plastic waste from these sources yearly. The harm these disposal methods cause to the environment through carbon emissions and particularly the marine environment, through the disruption of entire ecosystems, cannot be ignored any longer. At Reelease, we are developing a pipeline for re-cycling and more importantly up-cycling these waste streams into useful products. Our solutions will create a green incentive in favor of the recycling process and promote the sustainable treatment of plastic maritime waste in order to accommodate the growing industry and aid the way to healthier, plastic-free seas.

Solution & Product

At Reelease we are researching how to efficiently and sustainably separate individual materials from multi-material ropes into pure, high-quality plastics to be used as feedstock back in the production process. Since our inception in 2021, we have been working closely with recycling experts and research institutes in order to explore different approaches for initially recycling and moving onwards upcycling these products; effectively adding value to the processed material. Our recycling research has as prime objectives the scalability of the project, purity and low-cost both economically and environmentally, while we also strongly believe that the choice to recycle can be incentivized by providing useful products back to our customers. To that end, we are experimenting with modern manufacturing technologies to give a new revolutionary life to these waste streams. Supported by our growing network of partners we embrace the challenge and are aiming to make re/up cycling of the target maritime products a streamlined process that is both an affordable and rewarding choice for our customers.

Innovation & Scalability

The problem we are trying to solve is both technical but also very much logistical in nature: 1) Technology: Observing a gap in recycling solutions and the technology used to separate different fiber materials from products such as mooring ropes, we are developing a process for extracting the plastic constituents from such products. While semi-sustainable solutions to the mooring rope problem have already been achieved by Reelease, there exists no further innovation, globally, that challenges the fully-sustainable and high-quality output standards that Reelease has set on achieving. 2) Logistics: In order to secure recycling interest as well as a steady supply of raw material, we have already established ever-growing channels in the maritime industry ranging from shipping companies, port authorities and fishing entities operating on a global scale. While based in Greece and with a global reach of customers, our technology has the potential to be distributed globally and be scaled-up to accommodate the recycling needs of major port hubs, effectively minimizing transportation costs. Through our actions we plan on giving maritime companies an incentive to choose recycling over cheap harmful disposal, but to also encourage port authorities to introduce greener disposal operations.

Traction & achievements

Reelease has already completed several recycling cycles, resulting in the research and production of end-products for use in the transportation industry. This provided us with a Proof of Concept (POC), demonstrating the feasibility of the recycling process. Additionally, in collaboration with leading research and academic institutes, we are conducting tests and experiments in order to find the optimal solution for our customers that can accommodate the range of products that we might encounter. We are confident that innovative R&D will allow us to reach our goal, which would be groundbreaking in the maritime recycling industry. Furthermore, we have already established various collaborations with leading shipping companies, mooring ropes manufacturers and others in order to continuously provide us with significant quantities of mooring ropes as well as fishing nets, for our R&D purposes and recycling purposes.

Team & Why Us

Our team contains a multi-disciplinary combination of both young and passionate members possessing extensive knowledge in the shipping sector, specializing from the operations to the technical departments, with backgrounds ranging from mechanical and marine engineering to IT, Material Science and Robotics from leading universities in Europe. Additionally, together with our partners in academia and industry, our knowledge covers sectors such as nanotechnology, additive manufacturing (3D printing), product design and more, all key for our success.

Funding Needs

So far, our traction and achievements have relied exclusively on our own funds. We are willing to explore new funding opportunities.