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Sergie Albino of ecoSPEARS: Fighting Environmental Contamination With Advanced Technology Sergie Albino: Ian Doromal, Dr. Phil Maloney, and I cofounded ecoSPEARS in 2017. We focus on clean tech, and we’ve obtained exclusive licenses from the NASA Kennedy Space Center for one of its environmental cleanup technologies, the Sorbent Polymer Extraction and Remediation System (SPEARS). We have also been building new technology, including the UV Cube water treatment system that we are now rolling out in the Spokane River Valley. We are a venture-backed company and have raised $3.2 million to date. We started with a seed round of $2.1 million or $2.2 million and recently closed our safe round for another $1.1 million. We have about 10 full-time employees and 5 part timers in Altamonte Springs, Florida. Our work takes us to California, Hawaii, and Washington State, and we have upcoming deployments in Guam; Sweden; and Washington, DC. Municipal Water Leader: How did you discover the technology for ecoSPEARS?
A SPEARS system being deployed in the port of San Diego.
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ergie Albino’s career has truly gone to the moon and back. After helping NASA with its effort to search for water on the moon, he wanted to find ways to improve the water on Earth. With that in mind, he started ecoSPEARS, a company that has developed technologies to clean up environmental contamination. These include the use of ultraviolet (UV) technology to clean contaminated water and alcohol and absorbing spikes to treat soil and sediments. In this interview, Sergie Albino tells Municipal Water Leader about ecoSPEARS’ cost-effective treatment solutions and the importance of a holistic approach to environmental protection. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about ecoSPEARS.
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Municipal Water Leader: What is the problem that ecoSPEARS seeks to solve? Sergie Albino: Once chemical contamination gets into the environment—into groundwater, soil, and sediment—it is a daunting task to clean it up. There’s a whole slew of different types of chemical contamination, caused by both legacy and emerging chemicals. We focus primarily on contamination by polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). PCBs were invented in 1929 and were used in transformers in the electrical utility market, painting supplies, caulking for windowsills and doors, and in the maritime industry. They were banned by the municipalwaterleader.com
PHOTOS COURTESY OF ECOSPEARS.
Sergie Albino: I am the cofounder of ecoSPEARS, a clean tech innovation company that is building technologies to help our environment. I went to school at the University of Central Florida and got an MBA at Rollins College. I started out as an aerospace engineer. I did a lot of work with the U.S. Department of Defense and eventually at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. I met the other cofounder of ecoSPEARS, Dr. Phil Maloney, during our work for NASA on a lunar rover program to search for water on the moon.
Sergie Albino: I worked as a subcontractor of NASA from 2007 to 2012, and around 2010–2011, I finished my MBA program at Rollins. I took a class called Global Sustainability Program that was particularly enticing because it included a 2‑week trip to Costa Rica. Being involved in the immersion program in Costa Rica and seeing sustainability being built from scratch inspired me. I already did engineering consulting on the side, but at that point I started wanting to address a need in the world. That eventually led to me to reach back out to Rollins and to become more involved with the school to pay it forward. I learned that NASA had approached Rollins about the NASA scholar distinction program, which was intended to match NASA technology with one or more MBA teams and spark entrepreneurship and green ventures in central Florida. In our third year, the SPEARS technology came about, and I recognized the names of Dr. Maloney, Dr. Jackie Quinn, and Dr. Robert Devor and wanted to reconnect with my old buddies. Long story short, here we are 4 years later.
