Belgium-based company looks to to turn floating menace in South Louisiana into a cash crop

A Belgium-based company wants to harvest water hyacinths, the bane of south Louisiana boaters, to create fibers for products ranging from insulation to cat litter.

Water hyacinths are invasive floating plants that obstruct waterways, and disrupt ecosystems, and can severely damage boat motors and marine structures. Rebeka Bahadorani is the founder and CEO of In-Between International, a company eyeing the aquatic nuisance as a resource for producing fiber. She and her colleagues are talking with the local and state officials about the project, and seeking investors in late August. If all goes well, Bahadorani said, they will build a $5 million factory in Gibson, potentially creating scores of jobs.

The fibers derived from the water hyacinths has been dubbed "Cynthia."

“Now in Louisiana we are launching the first ever production unit of Cynthia fibers to demonstrate that it works," Bahadorani said. "I hope this will be an alternative to the use of pesticides or chemicals and give us an amazing, alive, almost inexhaustible resource all over the globe."

The floating menace

Water hyacinths are a world-wide aquatic nuisance that if left unchecked take over waterways, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Biologist Michael Coulon said. The biologist is in charge of overseeing the management of invasive aquatic plants like the hyacinth, with a budget of approximately $5 million for Louisiana. He drove a small boat through Turtle Bayou showing hyacinths and how they affect the ecosystem as he spoke.

At the local level governments have to spend thousands combating the plant's growth as well: in Terrebonne this amounts to about $150,000-250,000 a year, and in Lafourche its managed by the Bayou Lafourche Freshwater District which spends $40-50,000 a year.

Coulon said there’s primarily three methods for dealing with the water hyacinth: manually removing them, unleashing critters like weevils that eat the plant, and spraying. Spraying, he said, is the most cost and time effective method, but the plant is mobile and reproduces so quickly that the number of hyacinths in a body of water doubles in number roughly every 10 days.

This creates a two-fold unique problem for the agency: the mobility of the plant means that is can drift into private areas where officials cannot spray only to reproduce and float back later, but, Coulon explained, even if they could spray the private areas, the department's budget wouldn't be able to keep up.

"Last year in South Louisiana, we sprayed somewhere around 22,000 acres," he said. "So we could expend our entire budget just spraying this marsh if we included the private properties."

Control of the plant’s numbers is a never ending battle, because to not spray at all just isn't an option.

If left unchecked, Coulon said, the water hyacinth's ability to reproduce will completely cover the surface of a body of water. This mat of hyacinths will bully out other vegetation and block out sunlight to an area. Low sunlight diminishes dissolved oxygen levels in the water and drives away fish. Overall, the plant will disrupt the natural ecosystem of a body of water.

"Its not good for other aquatic plant diversity and to that extent not good for most aquatic environments," he said. "If you want a balanced system, you don't want something that's basically dominate the entire system and more or less take over."

The mass of hyacinths would also impede boat traffic by damaging motors, and Coulon said there are reports of the clumps of hyacinths getting so out-of-control they damaged bridges in Florida .

The plant is similarly a problem in many other places such as the aforementioned Florida, Vietnam, Australia, Africa, and more. It was in Africa that Bahadorani encountered the plant, completely covering a body of water and completely shutting it off to human travel. Where others saw a problem, Bazadorani saw potential.

Seeing green

Her company found that by capturing the plant, separating the stem from the roots, drying the stem, and then grinding it up, they could harvest a fiber useful as insulation, flower pots, and as an absorbent.

That part of the process is proven, Bahadorani said, now she’s trying to prove that this technology can turn a profit. She said her search led her to America, and from there Terrebonne, where last year she established an arm to her company named Cynthia Louisiana LLC. In late August she will return to Terrebonne Parish to scout the area for locations to harvest water hyacinths. According to Bahadorani, her company needs 300 tons of the plant every day to reach her goal.

Officials from both Terrebonne and Lafourche think that shouldn't be a problem.

"We can certainly provide them with the crop here in South Louisiana," Bayou Lafourche Freshwater District Executive Director Dustin Rabalais said.

If Bahadorani can find a reliable source, she said she will build a factory in Gibson. The factory will house her machines that processes the plant into the fiber. The amount of the plant she can secure will determine the number of factories, and those factories, in turn, will determine how many employees she will need - about 20-35 each.

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Some will be full-time employees and others will be seasonal. The seasonal employees would only be needed during the harvesting season, but she said the harvest season would coincide with the end of the sugarcane harvesting season, so there may be potential for partnership there.

“The interesting thing also about the seasonal employment is that we need seasonal labor when the sugar cane industry stops," she said. "So my idea was to go and meet some people from the sugarcane industry and say 'we can work together here, and we can offer a fulltime job to people with a change of activities half-a-year.'"

Terrebonne Economic Development Association’s CEO Cohen Guidry said he thinks her company could acquire a supply of 500 tons per day. Guidry intends to give Bahadorani and others from her company a tour around Terrebonne of possible locations they could harvest from, and said there may be potential for her to pick up the plant from areas the parish removes it from the water.

According to Guidry, the parish will be removing the nuisance from its waterways regardless if her company moves in, so there may be potential for a public-private partnership that would help keep Terrebonne Parish’s waterways clean.

Correction: This version of this story has been corrected. An early version said the number of employees would be determined per machine. That has been corrected to per factory.

This article originally appeared on The Courier: Belgium-based company looks to to turn floating menace in South Louisiana into a cash crop