Mark Riggio starts new venture

Mark Riggio is no stranger to ballast water, having worked with UV-based systems. He has extensive experience in vessel operations, and a unique skill set honed as a class surveyor, licensed engineer and vessel fleet manager. With this experience, he has seen ballast water issues from all sides.

He noted the industry has long called for ballast water treatment systems to be invisible black boxes that are cheap, easily installed, and seamlessly integrate with a ship’s ballast system, allowing a vessel to comply with the regulations, but not be inconvenienced.

He added that a ballast water treatment system not working 100% efficiently is hardly surprising, when the challenge has been to fit a treatment system capable of treating a medium city-sized flow of water, up to 100 times more stringently than drinking water, into a non-existent space on a moving ship with overtasked, undertrained operators.

In his opinion, ballasting has quite simply become one of the most challenging operations a ship must undertake.

With his new venture, Simplify Ballast, he is looking to change that.

Simplify Ballast is a company focused on addressing the challenges of implementing ballast water management systems on ships.

Using onboard assessments, analysis of data logs, interviews with the operators, and Mr Riggio’s decades of experience in the ballast water market, Simplify Ballast aims to provide concrete, clear instructions to customers on how to improve the performance of their ballast water treatment systems.

Mr Riggio said, “I am excited to be able to help crews to use their systems effectively.” He added, “Maintaining the stability of a vessel is challenging, operating your BWMS should not be. We want to make ballasting simple again.”