When I first spoke with him last
November, Noel was very much
in the news for his seven-foot-by-
ten-foot brine management system
which produces clean drinking
water. As we sat in Serenity Park
back then, he seemed less aware
of the deep sense of pride that
the news reports about him were
triggering in people’s minds -- not
only locally but elsewhere. as a result of worsening drought
conditions there, Noel said he was
moved to quench the villagers’
thirst by thinking outside the box.
The fisherman from the fishing
village is no fish out of water when
it comes to science, but felt he
had to find a way of fishing fresh
water from the saltwater that kisses
the shores of the southwestern
community.
Back then, he told me that he had
spent most of the previous year
tweaking an existing invention
to come up with a process which
produces no brine or any toxic
substance as a by-product. The
solar-powered desalination system,
he said, was environmentally-
friendly and cost-efficient. An invitation from the Global
Environmental Facility Small
Grants Programme (GEF-SGP)
to find a solution soon came and
Noel, a member of the Laborie
Fishermen’s Cooperative Society,
theorized building a solar-powered
desalinator, which fell right into the
project guidelines that required
incorporating renewable energy
and climate change.
After witnessing firsthand the
myriad of challenges villagers
faced for years in his native Laborie
www.slyoumag.com | September-October 2019
Desalination plants generally pose
serious environmental problems
when toxic brine (a by-product
of the desalination process) is
dumped into the sea, thereby
threatening marine life. But Noel’s
desalinator re-processes the brine
in the system itself and is much
cheaper to use as opposed to
pumping brine five miles out to sea.
Noel’s desalinator removes all
impurities, even minerals; however,
in the post-filtration process, its
re-mineralizer reintroduces the
minerals back into the water. The
1,000-gallon prototype was built
for demonstration purposes but
villagers often came by for their
fill of pure water when there was
none flowing through their taps.
Word soon got out and everyone
wanted to see the new system he
had created.
SL-YOU | It’s All About Business 55