Our Stroy

Entrepreneurs with innovative and high-impact ideas usually need one major thing to make their business idea a reality...Capital! For many, it’s as simple as taking out a loan, seeking grant funding where possible, asking friends and family or using their personal savings. For innovators who especially want to make a positive and lasting environmental impact with their ideas, they have often found the process of raising capital to be a challenging endeavor.

Having initially developed a technology that recycled toxic coal ash into six types of mineral fibers or pulp, my GCS Fibers (GCS) co-founder and I embarked on an ambitious journey to commercialize the technology. Coal ash is a byproduct from industrial sources such as coal-fired electricity generating power plants that is then disposed off in landfills and ash ponds. Eventually, the toxins and cancer causing heavy metals in the coal ash would leach into ground waters across global communities thereby, contaminating large swaths of drinking water sources. GCS’ initiative to repurpose as much as 1 million tons of coal ash each year per factory will generate substantial and meaningful jobs, reduce the public health costs associated with the ills of coal ash, reduce poverty across the world and provide high-quality mineral fibers for downstream industries some of which, can even reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Throughout our endeavor, the biggest challenge that we faced was that of raising capital. From my prior professional experience in small business development at the U.S. Department of Defense, the process of sourcing grants or even outright funding for environmental initiatives proved much more time consuming and frustrating non-environmental initiatives. In my opinion, this issue stems from traditional project financing institutions not being willing or able to consider the long-term impact of environmentally friendly innovations on our planet’s ecology as part of their bottom-line or return on investment. As I saw it, there simply had to be a better way to get funding for these high impact, environmentally friendly, poverty reducing, job-creating and high profit generating projects such that of GCS.

The Ash Environmental DOA and its Ash Token ecosystem were created because we see the value in supporting environmentally friendly innovations and initiatives that would create jobs, deliver relevant solutions and/or products for downstream industries, benefit the environment and reduce poverty. We know first-hand, the frustrations involved with the TRADITIONAL process of raising capital for the commercialization of great ideas. So, we built a platform that would leverage cryptocurrency’s global reach and ability to disrupt that status quo with respect to funding environmentally friendly innovations around the world. When one contributes to, and supports our ecosystem, you would be acquiring the voting power to facilitate efforts to eliminate global pollution, job creation & poverty reduction, reduction of energy costs for consumers, reduction of public health costs associated with pollution, and the introduction of high-grade raw materials and services to downstream industries such as the climate control sector, steel manufacturing sector, automobile & aerospace manufacturing sector, building construction sector and the textiles sector, just to name a few.

We encourage you to join us now as we endeavor to rid our world of pollution and better the world while delivering groundbreaking and high profit-yielding innovations for what is left of today’s generation and those of our children to come.

Ato Andoh, Founder & CEO, The Ash Environmental DAO, The Ash Token