Upcycling Caribbean (IWUP)

Integrated Waste Upcycling Plants converting municipal solid waste into syngas, electricity, and advanced carbon materials using JFE Engineering shaft-type gasification. Zero-landfill technology designed for island and coastal communities. Currently developing projects in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Learn more on our dedicated Upcycling Caribbean page

Structural Supercapacitor Wall

A wall already carries load, resists hurricanes, and lasts a century. We add a fourth job: storing electricity. Each concrete panel holds a laminated stack of 42 double-layer supercapacitor cells, with graphene and single-walled carbon nanotube electrodes on a basalt-fiber scaffold and an ionic-liquid gel electrolyte. The storage element contains no lithium and has no thermal-runaway pathway, and it is designed to tolerate EMP, with the supporting electronics in a shielded enclosure.

Design basis, per 4 ft × 8 ft × 8 in panel: about 1 kWh usable and 1 kW continuous. A 15-panel string is planned at about 15 kWh usable and 15 kW, or roughly three days of critical loads or one day of a whole Puerto Rico home, recharged by about 2.8–4.8 kWp of solar.

Construction diagram of one structural supercapacitor wall panel: wall section, single cell with collectors, and parallel wiring

Status: Design and modeling are complete. Figures are design estimates, not test results. The next step is a full-size test panel to measure utilization, resistance, and electrolyte uptake.

EMPCrete

EMP-hardened building materials meeting MIL-STD specifications for electromagnetic pulse survivability. Graphene-doped concrete and Faraday cage shielding systems designed to keep critical infrastructure — data centers, command facilities, power stations — operational when the grid goes down. Combines structural strength with electromagnetic protection in a single pour.

BFRP Corrugated Marine Panel

Seawalls fail because the steel rusts, not the concrete. We replace the steel with basalt fiber-reinforced polymer (BFRP) rod, which cannot corrode electrochemically, and cast the panel in our graphene-enhanced concrete to slow the chloride front. The corrugated shape supplies the stiffness, and prestress keeps the panel uncracked under working load.

Design basis: a dense low-permeability skin on the marine face, a structural core carrying the BFRP where chloride is lowest, a cast-in tongue-and-groove interlock with a grouted shear key, and a continuous cap beam. Panels are precast in reusable molds. The 75 to 100 year service life is a design target, not a claim. It depends on verified mix permeability, BFRP durability data, and project-specific service-life modeling.

Cross-section of a graded precast marine panel: dense low-permeability skin on the marine face, structural core with basalt-fiber rod, chloride gradient from marine face to land face
Design rendering of a corrugated precast wall panel, ten feet long, with three rounded flutes and drainage holes; labeled Waving Wall
Waving Wall™ panel design, ten-foot section. © 2026 Stephen Garbutt.
Underwater view of the installed marine panel wall, July 2026: marine growth on the submerged face with fish swimming alongside
Underwater view of the installed marine panel wall, July 2026: marine growth and fish along the submerged face.

Status: installed in the ocean. The photo above shows the wall underwater in July 2026.