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Race for Water Community

Marco Simeoni

President and founder of the Race for Water Foundation

Marco Simeoni : A passion which prompts him to take action

“I’ve always been passionate about sailing and the oceans. I could not stand by watching them deteriorate and do nothing”.

Determined, enterprising and convinced. Marco Simeoni grew up in the Lausanne region in French-speaking Switzerland before studying engineering. “I’ve always been passionate about sailing and the oceans. I couldn’t stand by watching them deteriorate and do nothing”.

An entrepreneur as well as an engineer, he created the IT consultancy firm Veltigroup, one of the three largest service providers in French-speaking Switzerland. In 2010, Marco utilised his passion for the oceans and his expertise as an engineer-entrepreneur to found the Race for Water Foundation.

In 2015, Marco participated in the first odyssey to go and see the plastic pollution of the oceans with his own eyes. “What we discovered went far beyond what we’d envisaged”. Plastic waste across all the beaches and within all the oceans. “In the gyres, we observed a ‘soup’ of microplastics. I very quickly realised that it was impossible to rid the oceans of these plastics”.

The solution is on land, by gathering up all the waste before it reaches the oceans. “In 2016, we considered possible solutions for protecting the oceans from the anthropogenic pollution. Today, I am proud to be heading back out there to demonstrate that there are solutions: a technology enabling plastic waste to be converted into energy resources, as well as to be at the heart of energy transition with our vessel powered by renewable energies powered by a mixture of solar, hydrogen and kite technologies”.