I am essentially an engineer: I studied at ICAM in Nantes, in other words I'm a non-specialised engineer, and actually started an eco-tourism company with a friend of mine, which didn't work out. We wanted to develop a concept of eco-tourism where people experience living close to nature, where they learn how nature works, partly to create empathy with people. It's a project we worked on for one and a half years and which unfortunately fell through. We put it on ice, and one day I received an e-mail from a friend of a friend, who was looking for an engineer to help him start a ship building yard, and so I left for Bangladesh, that was in 2009. And I settled there and realised that if they were starting to make boats with fibreglass, that meant they were bringing in glass fibre with resin, that meant they didn't have much wood left in Bangladesh, because
of deforestation, and so this was going to lead to what happened in India, Thailand, pretty much everywhere in the world in fact. In other words they were going to use this material that consumes a large amount of during production and which they didn't know what to do with
at the end of its life. And at the time, I was living just opposite the shipyard, on a river. And on the other side of the yard there was actually a jute field, the jute, and a jute factory. Jute is actually a plant that grows 3-4 metres tall, and which is almost unique to that region of the world, 80% unique, and was the pride and entire wealth of the country until the late 80s but is sadly on a rapid decline, and I said to myself, what if we use jute fibre instead of glass fibre, it would be great from an ecological point of view, because it grows
in the fields, and from an economic point of view because it would allow an industry to get back
on its feet which is really on the decline, and from a social point of view, there are 40 million people there still living on this industry, and so it would preserve this know-how which is unique in the world. And so I
began to look into things until I had come up with a prototype called Tara Tari which is made from 40 parts per 100 jute fibre, 60 parts per 100 glass fibre. To prove it was resistant and to try and find the money to continue the research, I sailed back to France: it took 6 months. I was invited to present the boat at nautical exhibitions and raise the interest of sponsors, get money, get scientific partners and motivate young people to join me in the venture. And so I returned to Bangladesh to set up the Gold of Bengale project, so we did some research into jute fibre to see how it could replace glass fibre. We took one year, so the team grew naturally over the
years of research, to the point now where there are 10 of us. We developed a material specially designed for the job, and then developed a machine to produce this material and now we are currently working with a Bangladeshi manufacturer so that they can build a factory, produce it in large quantities, and sell it not only in Bangladesh but throughout the world. And so now we have come out of the research phase and are really beginning to see the impact created by everything we have done. We conducted research in a slightly MacGyverist way, where when it came to it we weren't specialists in our field, but we found French specialists in composite materials who we meshed in one way or another with Bangladeshi jute fibre specialists created this innovation without being specially... specialists in the field. And so we said, well actually, we can, almost fresh out of university, without being terribly specialised in our field, create innovations that can go as far as changing entire countries and so we decided we wanted to continue with it and broaden what you might call our research centre, into other areas of research and so last year we embarked on a new project called "Nomade des Mers" or
"Nomad of the Seas". The idea is that we will go round the world on a jute fibre catamaran, carrying out experiments on board to promote low technologies, and the idea is that we're currently setting up a collaborative platform for research into low technologies, on which we will be setting 50 research challenges, for example can we make energy, produce energy using algae?, can we produce electricity using a bicycle mechanism?, can we eat and farm insects to combat a shortage of proteins?, etc. Around 50 challenges that we're setting to students, companies, enthusiasts, retired people-- in fact anybody-- and you propose solutions to those challenges by sending us videos presenting your solution, e.g. whoever invents a means to desalinate seawater
using solar power will send us a video to show us how it works. And, alongside a jury of experts, we will select the most interesting solutions, the most interesting ventures, and we will invite them on to the boat during the round-the-world tour, to install their system and so over the course of the world tour, the boat will become more and more self-sufficient and will become a "Nomad of the Seas". And the aim is on the one hand to boost research into lo-tech, prove such systems on board the boat by testing them, because the boat is a good means for testing anything lo-tech, any self-sufficient system, actually. And we will be promoting things to the max, going to each country and seeing what they are doing in terms of lo-tech and sharing it all.
