First off, greetings from the Norf. A bit about me, i'm a 31-year old half-Indonesian, half-Dutch guy living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I'm looking to start a soil-restoration project down under, but besides one estranged relative I don't really know anyone there.
The gist of the story is, my friends father
Ibrahim Al-Alim developed a new firefighting material after the first Gulf War, at Swiss university EPFL. He saw a need for it first-hand, after witnessing unstoppable oil fires ravage Kuwait when the pumps and refineries got bombed. However, it turned out that the water-regulating properties of his invention were particularly suitable for plants. With his material, Ibrahim managed to let plants survive dry periods up to 3 times longer, mature faster and use less water overall. Because it resembles "pieces" of solid water when hydrated, we decided to call the material
SolidWater, which is a bit catchier than the original PagriSAP (Patented Agricultural Superabsorbent Polymer).
Ibrahim dedicated the rest of his life to halting the advance of deserts with his technology. He had limited success on several projects, contributing to the Green Wall of Africa and even growing a forest of 6000+ trees in the middle of the Arabian desert. Unfortunately however, he died an untimely death in 2017.
Yet as fate would have it, in June 2016, barely a year before he passed, me and my friend Adnan agreed to see if we couldn't have a crack at selling Ibrahim's technology ourselves. The idea was to advertise it online to our fellow millennial struggling to keep his or her house/weed-plants alive. If we sold big, which of course we wholeheartedly assumed we would, we could then do our part in greening the desert, get rich in the process and make both our dear old dads weep with pride.
We had no idea that Ibrahim had so little time left. His death was a blow from which we never really recovered. But as they say in dutch: "beloofd is beloofd", a promise is a promise. And we did call our company LegacyRoot, so we never truly gave up trying to fulfill his dream of turning the deserts into forest. We just couldn't let it go. Which over the years led us to come up with
this plan to help restore eroded soils in Australia.
I sincerely hope you guys like it, and also that it adequately lines out why Australia is so important as a staging area. Sorry for the long story, i did my best to keep it succinct. It would be amazing if something came out of this post, but just a push in the right direction might already help a lot. Thanks in advance!
Sincerely,
Sebastiaan Lumanauw
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