Globe-Eco
It started with a single burning field.
Since 2010.
In 2010, our founder traded Silicon Valley for his family’s coconut plantation in the Philippines.
After every harvest, husks and fronds that could have been building material burned in open fields, because no one paid for them.
He gave himself six months.
Six months became ten years.
We worked alongside coconut farmers and their families. We built pilot factories far from the grid, and we kept going through typhoons and the long work of inventing something new. When a typhoon damaged our family home, the work became personal in a way it had not been before.
The breakthrough came in two parts. The first was a dependable way to make load-bearing board from coconut residue without synthetic binders, developed at our research facility in the United States beginning in 2019. The second was a way to make that board at production scale in remote plantations with no grid. Our Innovation Center in the Philippines is where we proved the two together.
Our next step is the first kit house.
The founders.
Binderless coconut board was a published research goal for twenty years: made in a laboratory in 2004, run on a pilot line in 2005, and never taken to production. Our team took it there, with equipment it designed and built, a process it holds as a trade secret, and a platform that goes to the plantation instead of bringing the plantation to a factory.
Matthew Grecsek
Founder & President
Designed the Globe-Eco system: the architecture of a manufacturing platform that deploys into remote plantations with no grid and no paved road, the process and energy requirements it had to meet, and the economic model under which one unit pays for itself and sets off the next. He left Silicon Valley software in 2010 for his family’s coconut plantations in the Philippines. Before that: Agenetics, an early artificial-intelligence platform he founded in 2000; IBM; Lockheed Martin, on the Joint Strike Fighter programme; First Union; Publix Super Markets.
Robert Knighton
Co-Founder
The Innovation Center runs because Robert built it: the equipment, assembled and integrated with the Filipino team; the energy plant he designed and engineered to run the line on coconut residue; and the board itself, developed through thousands of pressings under his lead. A master builder and engineer, he designed the kit houses the board frames and leads the build programme in the Philippines.