“Why do we continue to make food production dependent on two increasingly scarce resources, such as fresh water and fertile soil, when we have two extraordinarily abundant resources, the sea and the sun?” This question is the origin of Eden Blue, a project that seeks to integrate desalination, agriculture, and marine biotechnology into a single system.
Its founder, Mario Ribelles, a student at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), explains that the project “jointly addresses problems that are usually treated separately: water scarcity, soil degradation, food production, the management of brine resulting from desalination, and the utilization of marine resources.”
The proposal stems from what Ribelles calls the “coastal paradox”: many of the areas beginning to suffer from water stress are located right by the sea, surrounded by vast amounts of water that cannot be used directly for drinking or farming.
The solution proposed by Eden Blue involves developing, in the long term, floating modular platforms capable of producing fresh water and food while simultaneously making use of the by-products generated during the process.
From Desalination to Food Production
The system would use solar energy to desalinate seawater and obtain fresh water for growing plants. The resulting brine, instead of being treated solely as waste, would be repurposed to cultivate halophilic microorganisms capable of producing high-value compounds.
“Eden Blue’s innovation lies not in a single technology, but in its integration,” notes Ribelles. The goal is to create a resource-use cascade in which the by-products of one process become resources for the next. And “the entire system would be monitored using sensors and IoT technology.”
A First Prototype by the End of the Year
According to its founder, Eden Blue is currently “between a proof of concept and the laboratory validation of its various components.” The team has already designed the first unit for obtaining fresh water and is beginning its assembly. In parallel, they are working on an experimental protocol to compare different substrates, irrigation systems, and beneficial microorganisms within the plant module.
The next step will be to conduct a first integrated bench-scale trial: producing water consistently, using it in a plant trial, and feeding the resulting real brine into a photobioreactor. “We are not looking for this first prototype to be pretty or commercial; we want it to produce reliable data,” Ribelles explains. The forecast is to publicly present this prototype by the end of 2026.
From University Project to Real Technology Supported by Awards
Eden Blue received the Young Talent Award of the Valencian Community in the Science category and was selected to receive support from ARI HUB, mentored by Pilar Sánchez from the Gandia Campus (UPV). For Ribelles, these two recognitions have helped lend credibility to the project and bring it closer to the business and technological worlds.
Now, the project faces another milestone: Eden Blue has been selected as the Innovative Project of the City of Gandia 2026 and will represent the city at Innpulso Emprende. For Ribelles, this is one of the most special recognitions because “we are not just going on behalf of a group of students; we carry the name of our city behind us.”
Currently, the Eden Blue team is composed of sixteen students from different degree programs and is tutored by Claudia Palloti Sagripanti, a professor at the Gandia Campus.
The challenge is to turn an idea born in the classrooms and laboratories of the UPV “into a validated, deployable technology capable of contributing to food production in places where agriculture relies increasingly on limited resources.”