Simonpietri Enterprises is among this year’s honorees for Pacific Business News’ annual Inno Fire Awards. To view the other winners, click here.
Simonpietri Enterprises is a technology and project developer specializing in renewable energy and fuel projects, often in collaboration with the transportation, fuel, waste management and defense sectors. Currently, its largest project, called Aloha Carbon, will make renewable fuels — including renewable natural gas — out of locally generated waste such as construction and demolition debris. The Aloha Carbon plant is currently under development in Kapolei. According to the company, the plant will divert 150-200 trucks per day from the landfill in Nanakuli, dispose of 50 tons of green waste per day, and avoid an estimated 100,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year.
Responses from Joelle Simonpietri, president
What’s been your organization’s biggest accomplishment to date? [We’ve had] a really positive response from community members on what we are doing, at our project development presentations to the Makakilo-Kapolei Neighborhood Board. … We started three years ago with careful community engagement and listening sessions from Ewa to Nanakuli to gather priorities on our project siting, waste streams, products, scale and more. One that I had the most fun with was our novel community survey pop-up tent at the Nanakuli Night Market. There we were with our little beach tent, with pictures and flyers of our future construction and demolition waste-to-energy project, asking people if they wanted to share their opinions with us.
Also, a lot of key milestones within the past quarter [include]:
- USDA has publicly announced our award of nearly $4 million in grant funding for the fertilizer co-product from our waste recycling and renewable energy production process
- Completed the pre-construction design and some construction drawings for our plant
- Completed first phase of demolition and site remediation of the site for our project in Campbell Industrial Park.
What about your business excites you the most right now? I am so excited at what our team has been able to accomplish. We have gone from one person with a PowerPoint slide deck to a team of 10 with a physical site and over $1 million worth of construction drawings in just a couple of years. And this is for a first-of-a-kind plant, to divert wastes like construction and demolition debris from landfilling and convert it to fuel and power. With community support. In Hawaii!
What is one thing you think we need as a state to cultivate a robust tech and innovation sector? It’s hard to define but I guess would be cultural: Keep helping each other out! Constructive criticism to improve what we do is always welcome. Partnering to do it is even better. Listening and then taking action are critical. … One thing that the state is already doing that has been enormously helpful to us is the Hawaii Technology Development Corporation’s Small Business Innovation Research and Manufacturing Extension Partnership matching funding programs. Keep funding them, legislators! I’ve been able to use those HTDC grants to hire students into their first-ever technical jobs, convert part-time entry-level positions to full-time pay, file for international patents on our innovations, and more.
