A true extrovert, D’silva gets her energy from interacting with and learning from people in various fields. And when they all come together to collaborate, she likens the experience to performing on stage with other musicians: “When I am on stage with musicians, some of them I’ve never met before, but we’re all in the zone because everybody’s speaking the same language of music. It’s the same with what I do at OPP.”

Since its founding in 2020, OPP has worked with a local fish farm to plant 221 seaweed and mussel lines around its perimeter. One line holds about 200 to 300 mussels, and each mussel can filter eight to 10 litres of seawater a day, shares D’silva, adding that the goal is to ramp this up and work with the more than 100 fish farms in the north of Singapore to help clean the sea and protect the fishermen’s livelihood.

However, doing so requires fundraising, a major hurdle for a social enterprise such as OPP, though D’silva is working hard to move OPP into Series A funding. This will help her and her team scale the bioremediation project as well as execute the plastic to hydrogen project, for which she already has in place all the technology. “[Securing funding] is the most difficult bit because we’re not an app or a software you can invest $10 million [in] and [get back 10 times that] in one -and a -half years. What we’re doing is the real stuff, working with project origination and getting our hands dirty,” explains D’silva. “Sowe hope to attract impact investors and companies who really want to do something concrete and operational.”

In November last year, D’silva was invited to present at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or the 27th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, more commonly known as COP27. She spoke about how OPP has gone beyond beach clean-ups in Pasir Ris to converting ocean plastics into hydrogen as well as seaweed into biofilters and bioplastics, showcasing the potential for its model to be implemented in other coastal communities where it can also create jobs. She recounts meeting a mayor of a town in Cairo, Egypt, at COP27 who wanted to learn how he could harness OPP’s model and technology to transform the lives of his people: “This town of 50,000 people is essentially where all the waste goes to and Egypt had just signed a hydrogen deal to scale green hydrogen projects, so he was eager for me to go to Cairo and show him how we can do this .”

She adds: “Sometimes, as a start-up and social enterprise, you get stuck, thinking, ‘Oh man, this is too hard. I don’t know if anybody understands what I’m trying to do.’ But then going out into the world, to COP27, where [more than] 40,000 people in sustainability [pleaded] their case, I realised how much [people in] the world need to speak to [one another] and work together. And that’s another great source of energy forme”.

NOW READ

How to support marine conservation in your everyday life

How Rolex testimonee Sylvia Earle plans to save the ocean one hope spot at a time

Three Southeast Asian eco-champions recognised at the inaugural Blue Water Heroes Awards