SUBSEA GENERATION CONNECT: AN INTERVIEW WITH ALWYN DU PLESSIS ON CABLE RECOVERY AND RECYCLING BY ISABELLE CHERRY
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n the first of a new Sustainable Subsea interview series, undergraduate UC Berkeley Environmental Policy and Management student Isabelle Cherry interviews Alwyn du Plessis of Mertech Marine about his experience in cable recovery and recycling. This series will feature interviews of subsea cable leaders and experts conducted by students and young professionals. These interviews offer a view for the next generation of the challenges and opportunities of working in the cable industry, especially while keeping sustainability in mind. Since recovery and recycling of subsea cables contributes to the circular economy and enhances sustainability, we begin with this emerging area. In the following dialogue, Alwyn du Plessis recounts the challenges and memorable experiences of his time at Mertech Marine, and comments on the significance of recognizing sustainability in his career. The conversation offers insights into the continued difficulty of working on the ocean despite all technological advancements, the need to stay agile and adaptive, and the ongoing importance of collaboration.
ISABELLE:
What are some of the biggest challenges in subsea cable recovery and recycling that you have encountered over the course of your career?
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ALWYN:
The entire journey was actually quite challenging. When we started off, we were really pioneering the commercial recovery and recycling of subsea cables. Everything we did was new, and there were not really any people we could go and ask. It took quite a lot of time and capital investment. One of the challenges that does stand out is working in the high seas, which is quite difficult by itself. In this industry, there are more things that are out of your control than in your control. You’ve got the sea that you have to contend with. You’ve got weather, you’ve got specific weather windows. You don’t know whether the cable is actually still there. There might have been an earthquake or a landslide or sand migration. All sorts of things could have happened. And you might not find the cable. Some of the older cables that we recovered, there was very little information around for those cables. We didn’t know exactly what the makeup of the cable was from a value point of view, exactly what the water depths were, or the exact lay positions. Commodity pricing can also vary. You may be pursuing a cable for years and then by the time you get it, the commodity prices might be completely different from when you started off on that journey. The industry has moved quite a lot from where initially recovery and
recycling wasn’t something anybody thought about. Today, a lot of companies are thinking about recycling and they see it as an opportunity. But in the beginning, you really had to twist people’s arms to get them to agree.
ISABELLE:
Yes, that definitely sounds like significant uncertainty and a lot of figuring out things on the fly. That leads to my next question: is there a particularly memorable project that you could share with us?
ALWYN:
It’s difficult to just identify one specific project. I think the ones that stand out for me are the recovery of the TAT-1 cable, which ran from Canada to the UK. This was the first submarine telephone cable laid across the Atlantic, although there were obviously telegraph cables before that. It was the first telephone cable ever recovered. Some of the equipment in that system was really quite high-tech at the time. Obviously, it was laid in around 1961, so by the time we recovered it in 2016, it was quite outdated. But the technology that was in there was really quite cutting-edge back in the 1960s. Then there’s China-US, for which we did a turnkey decommissioning. This was actually the first turnkey, let’s call it a “mega-decommissioning” of a cable system, where the cable owners engaged with us even before