A Florida startup company is looking to pair new technology licensed for use by NASA and large- scale public donations to pay for the continued Hudson River PCB cleanup.

ecoSPEARS, based in Orlando and founded in 2012 by Serg Albino, a former NASA engineer, will be kicking off a GoFundMe campaign this August to crowdfund the removal of harmful PCB contaminants from Hudson River sediment.

The technology features a mat with several "spears" attached that are pressed into the riverbed sediment, and using a proprietary fluid, act as a sponge and absorb PCBs within four inches of each spike.

Once PCBs are absorbed into each spear over the course of six to 12 months, they are taken back to a lab where the company uses a chemical process to destroy the PCBs at a molecular level — a cleaner process than dumping contaminated sediment in a landfill, or incineration.

General Electric in 2002 agreed to a seven-year, $1.7 billion cleanup of the Hudson River with the Environmental Protection Agency after polluting the waterway for decades.

But Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Basil Seggos said GE's dredging project left behind too many toxic PCBs, and the state sued the EPA after the agency in April declared GE's cleanup agreement was satisfied.

The cleanup removed about 310,000 pounds of the PCB-tainted sediment, or 72 percent of what is now known to be in the river.

Now, ecoSPEARS' founders say their method will be less costly and destructive to the environment than the dredging processes that GE implemented.

"Today's science and technology can solve the issue. Yes, it's difficult, and you guys have tried all you can," Albino said, referring to companies like GE that have been tasked with cleaning the river. "But you've also tried for a very long time and cannot keep trying the same old methods."

NASA first developed the technology, and in 2017 licensed it for use by ecoSPEARS.

The GoFundMe campaign is presenting an ambitious goal — raising $1.5 billion to use toward the river cleanup. But Albino said ecoSPEARS will be operating under a milestone system, and will present results to the public as the project progresses.

Following the start of the fundraising campaign later this year, Albino said ecoSPEARS would use the first $100,000 raised to perform a "treatability study" where sediment would be collected from the Hudson and the firm would show how it's technology can extract PCBs from the river.

As a next step, ecoSPEARS would begin deploying the spear mats on between 100 and 1,000 square feet of riverbed at a pre-determined location along the river, according to Ian Doromal, co-founder and vice president of ecoSPEARS.

He said ecoSPEARS plans to share results of the different tests along the way to prove it offers a feasible solution to contamination, and said the initial deployment of the technology will "help us prove scalability."

"Of course it's not going to be an overnight thing, or a 12 month thing. It's going to extend years," Doromal said of the cleanup efforts. "The main thing is it's finally showing results that technology can work, and giving the community more of a say, more of an inside view of the technology that's really working."

Doromal said the company hasn't decided whether it will create a nonprofit entity to manage the donations, but said they would use some kind of third party to properly dole out funding.

Although the largest GoFundMe campaigns to date have raised just over $20 million, Albino noted that if people are willing to contribute to help with things like the removal of plastic from the ocean, or the rebuilding of the Notre Dame cathedral in France, this project should be able to garner similar support.

"It's about cause," Albino said. "This GoFundMe we're looking to create is providing people an outlet, a cause to belong to."