Does the solution to coastal resilience lie offshore? Matt Campbell, President of NatrX

[Music] welcome to the podcast where we celebrate Innovation for a happy Planet I am your host Abigail Carrol if you live on the coast this is a podcast you might want to pay special attention to in episode 43 we spoke to George Burch about his establishing oyster beds in order to participate in European nitrogen and carbon credit programs today's guest Matt Campbell is the founder of nature tricks and he joins us to talk about his business that establishes oyster and coral reefs with a very different goal in mind to build Coastal resilience so if you're thinking you might need a new bulkhead to protect your property from a storm you might want to think again Matt might tell you that a better solution or at least a complimentary one lies further offshore but let's hear it from Matt welcome to the podcast Matt Abigail it's great to be here so you are the co-founder of a company called natrix what problem are you trying to solve yeah so we're we're looking at Coastal resilience and ecological resilience so you hear a lot of people talk about Coastal resilience but we want to bring those two things together because as more people are moving to the coast as you have more development happening we see a lot of nature being pushed out and what we want to do is we want to bring bring that back in to the Forefront of how we build in that environment and is that because the presence of nature is actually helping the coastal resilience absolutely and we and we've seen that over the years of us working but it's been it's been talked about in Academia for a long time and it's shown that the power of nature and its ability to adapt is is unprecedented and when you look at our man-made infrastructure when it fails it fails catastrophic ically but nature doesn't really fail it just adapts but there may there may be other things that um you want to consider like what what kind of habitat is out there right and a lot of times people are having trouble getting these projects permitted because there's more and more regulation around this as well what we can do is we can come in with our platform and help people efficiently come up with a solution for that and then incorporate nature based features into that overall solution right so what is your solution so what we want to do is we want to provide technologies that enable people to easily Implement these types of nature-based solutions yeah and so within those Technologies we're working on various aspects of that one we're working on analysis tools that are focused on nature-based infrastructure such as Wetlands reefs magnet Groves and other other types of of natural features and then we have additive manufacturing where we can manufacture structures that are optimized for that environment both from a a stability standpoint but also from a ecological standpoint and then we're also looking at ways that we can value that so if if we're protecting habitat what's the value of that is there carbon benefits to doing things in this way is there by diversity benefits of doing things in this way we want to be able to expose that value to our clients and to others right tell me about what a what a process looks like to you sure so when we think about building on the coast and especially building with nature-based features we tend to as Engineers we tend to look at it as a Bridge Project or something you know where it's it has to withstand a certain storm event and it's got to have certain predictability about it the problem is is nature is not not predictable as steel right you have to look at it differently and so the the first thing you need to do is understand how are those natural systems behaving how they historically behave yeah and we may need to bring in domain experts for that but we may take various types of data that are easily accessible satellite data or liar data Petry data to get a sense over time what is happening to that that environment and Coastal environments are notoriously Dynamic but you can understand them you can model that and so we use AI tools to help us understand what's going on in that environment and then once we understand that then we can start to craft a solution around that but the solution is it's something that's going to be more in line with those natural systems and not overdesigned you know I talk a lot about performance criteria versus design life you know and people ask well how long does a reef last well there's reefs out in the Gulf of Mexico that are thousand years old so how long do you want it to last right but how do you want it to perform and a lot of times these systems don't operate in a vacuum you know you have the oysters that are holding the lower uh line of the profile together to where they're knocking down waves enough so where the grasses can grow so they switched it into a new equilibrium those grasses further knock that energy down and then they start to grow um in height because there's settlement the the sediments of that then you start to have high Marsh and then you start to have riparian zones and so this whole thing starts to move into a more natural equilibrium that that Shoreline would go to without us trying to draw a line but if we can understand how that works then we can shift it into that new new equilibrium right so it sounds like your solution isn't just to maybe build a rock wall or or just one Jetty out and so would you build an oyster Reef absolutely we build oyster reefs often and that is like I said we're trying to switch that equilibrium let nature take over and then do its thing so I'll give you an example we have a lot of clients that have a lot of Legacy infrastructure that's out on the coastline specifically in these Wetland kinds of areas and what we'll do is is we'll we'll look at where their assets are we'll look at the vulnerability of the the wetlands around those assets because the wetlands are actually protecting those assets and typically what they would do is oh we have an exposure here we'll go and we'll throw some U like a concrete mattress on it a rock there well what happens is is the environment around it is changing in response to that and then you might have a bigger problem on your hands and so what we do is we back up off of that we say what is the Environmental around it doing okay well these wetlands are in danger so how can we put in an oyster Reef around this area to protect those Wetlands that then are protecting that infrastructure I mean can you explain to listeners more about why why a reef you know I think most people think of reefs as beautiful like what role do they really play in terms of infrastructure we love to go visit them and snorkel around them and try to wear the right San Lo should one we around them but what what why are they so important the reefs themselves add um roughness to the seafloor and so as waves come from offshore they encounter this roughness and it dissipates the energy of those waves so this is just how our coastlines have evolved over Millennia you have these these huge reefs that have been out there but we've mined them in a lot of cases I mean most of the roads especially in the bigger cities were made out of reefs wow I did not know that and people used to grind up the reefs and they burn the shell to make concrete and so we've harvested so much of our Reef out of the water and now we have these organic soils and as sea level rises more of these organic soils are being exposed and they're eroding away fast F pace so we've removed the hard structure away from from our coastlines that have made the land more vulnerable it's a double whammy because as that land erods there's less land there to stop when the bigger Storms Come With The Surge and so then you have penetration further Inland because that land is now gone and so it's a whole system that you have to look at and and if you're if you're taking that that bleeding edge away the next phases are a lot more vulnerable so who pays for a you know what type of client is pro protecting Wetlands right now you know a municipal project or lots of yeah we we do work with State Municipal Federal um but then there's also private companies that are paying for this private land owners uh that are paying for this nonprofits who have larger missions in in protecting wetlands and reefs so we do a lot of work with with nonprofits and helping them achieve their goals so you told me a funny story about uh being in school and suggesting to a professor that um an an oyster Reef might be a good solution to correct some ecological deterioration and your your professor will tell us that story sure yeah it's it's come a long way since then and when was this back then nobody this was in the early 2000s and I'm from Louisiana so you know going out in the marshes you don't see natural rock it's all brought in from the middle of the us but we do have a lot of oysters and so I had this crazy idea that oh maybe we can use oysters to stop erosion instead of bringing in this rock that ultimately sinks and uh no one was really talking about that back then um so when I brought it to some professors I was in grad school at the time and they were they were engineers and working in offshore kind of ocean engineering and well you can't really design for what an oyster is going to do you know it'll die and you don't have you know just kind of thinking about well you know if you have piece of Steel you know how strong it is you know how to attach it you know what those are but if you're going to deal with a biological organism how do you even work with that and basically said yeah don't really want to be on your committee uh that doesn't sound doesn't sound like something I want to get involved with uh but you know as as I I moved on with that uh anyways because I'm stubborn like that and you got the last laugh I think on this one that's that's right and uh you know later there was a little bit of change in heart and they they wanted to get on my committee because it is it is fascinating to see what's happening in in nature and then when you can replicate that and and use it in a way that it was was meant to be used right because we understand it better it seems like you have tools you've created tools to help nature help us so what are some of those specific tools you mentioned the planning and the analysis but you've also been doing some you're looking at new materials to build these structures with you have some printing methods and other methods to to create these structures can you tell me a bit about that because I think some of it's of your own invention yes it you know our motivation from the beginning was to develop lots of different Technologies to enable more of this to happen and and to empower others to do more of this as well and so um part of that is is developing this platform that that can be expanded so you mentioned the the satellite technology so that that allows us to rapidly plan on a landscape scale so we're doing thousands of miles a ride away we're monitoring coastlines of entire countries wow you get large scale with that and so that brings down the cost and so then that allows us to do more with less the other technology is something that we developed inhouse that you're alluding to we call it dry forming and it's a completely new way of forming concrete and we can create shapes that are very naturalistic that have lots of structural complexity that allow for lots of different types of species so I was talking about ecological resilience when you create something that is structurally complex it allows for different size classes of species different types of species different places for things to hide and so then that whole system becomes ecologically resilient so if there's a an event that disturbs them you know a damage a storm a spill a shipwreck they can bounce back because there is um there is that resilience built into that that habitat and then we we also have some material uh innovations that we're working on so a lot of our nonprofit clients for example like these uh shell bags where they put oyster shells in bags put them out it's great for awareness uh in the community you can get the community involved but they're plastic and so it kind of conflicts with their mission so we there's a huge interest out there for coming up with non-plastic Alternatives so we're looking at non-plastic Alternatives uh that you can make these shell bags out of so that's separate from our other work but it's still in line with our mission of trying to create better Technologies for this space we're also looking at some technologies where we can take dredge material and turn it into reefs and so not just sand but like the muddy Mucky stuff that everybody finds hard to get rid of or even contaminated dredge materials can you take that bind up all the contaminants but make a re make it into a reef or Coastal protection structure you talked to me about biochar too could you do you want to talk a little bit about that yeah so one of the things that our our dry forer allows us to do is utilize different types of materials one because there's no mixing involved in the way that we do it so you can use things that have been traditionally hard to do in wetcast type of um fabrication so we can mix in a large amounts of biochar which biochar is really interesting material it's it's gained a lot of a lot of press recently because it allows you to sequester carbon um it's basically carbon so if you can bind that up then you are sequestering carbon for long periods of time so it's being used in agriculture and other people even tried to put it in cement the problem is is that it breaks uh it breaks up the uh strength of the cement pretty quickly because of having to mix it and the water retention of it so we can mix in higher concentrations of that but some of the even more interesting things about biochar is it will absorb really nasty things that are hard to get rid of out of the water like peas which people are starting to talk more about or the nutrients that um are are causing damage in the ecosystems when there's too much of it like phosphates and um and even can take up heavy metals and things like that so it's not just the carbon aspect of it but I think it's also the water um the water quality aspects it has big benefits so we've done some studies where we've mixed biochar and other types of materials into the mix to create really high surface area structures that then water can pass through to see um see if it how much it cleans up the water and we our preliminary results of that have been very positive we still have more R&D to go on that but I think that there's there's a lot of opportunity there with these types of materials and biochar is as I understand it's rice husk so it's it's there's plent there's a lot of it it can be pretty much any type of plant material that's been charred so they basically zero oygen it can be its own power source but then it creates this positive output is there one project that you've worked on today that gets you excited you know there's a project we're doing in Hawaii right now that I'm pretty excited about it's a coral project and I fell in love with the ocean diving on corals but we're we're repairing it's it's called reframe is the name of the project and it's kind of a play on words we're reframing how you can do coral restoration it's also a reef frame that we're going to plant corals onto as a nursery and so this Nursery will eventually become a permanent Reef but it's going to serve a larger Reef Community as well and the idea of what we're doing is is we're creating um we're taking a whole ecosystem approach and we're creating all of these spaces with within the reef um that has space for urchins and the smaller reef fish and some of these habitat specific habitat types that accommodate those beneficial species that can keep the their corals healthy as they're in the nursery but also allowing for areas for natural siment um settlement of other corals that will eventually turn it into its own reef and so as we're seeing Reef destruction and different places and degradation of the overall Reef structure could this be a new way forward for how we can restore these reefs in the future yeah who who is a client for restructuring a reef for rebuilding is that a that's a nonprofit it's uh a nonprofit federal agencies so um FEMA just designated coral reefs as infrastructure we're starting to look at what does that look like to start to rebuild some of this natural infrastructure yeah and so the federal government really is looking into this and there's a number of programs out there specifically for this the the Department of Defense is looking at this because it's a national security risk right when their bases are being eroded away and they had natural infrastructure there before and now it's been degraded and now they're at risk and if you combine that with things like C rise and storms now there's some very big risk uh associated with that well I think it's really interesting and it's something that we don't think too much about because it's a little bit counterintuitive when you're losing your your seaw wall to think that the seaw wall is not the most important thing to be thinking about right now it's it's a it's out it's a place out in the ocean I don't know how many feet out you would know that better than I do but it's not necessarily adjacent it's it's it's in the distance like the first buffer needs to come out come further out yeah that's right and I think you know we we like to draw lines and say this is this is where my property is or this is you know because it's a known thing but but the ocean doesn't care about that line you know it's going to blow past it and you know there's different um Dynamics within the ocean that that develop when you have these types of offshore structures I mean in Coastal Engineering it's it's very well known that if you put a structure offshore it's going to affect how the waves move in and we've learned how to shape those structures and put those structures where they bend the waves and dissipate the waves in a certain way to produce a known result that we want well nature learned that way before us and so you know the Surfers have learned that as well you know to know where to go where the reefs are and and how catch breakes and things when they're surfing so it's it's a well-known thing it's just can we use that to our advant we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors I'd like to thank Gul of main Research Institute and bold ocean Ventures for their support of happy Planet podcast gmri and bold ocean Ventures have partnered to create a mission-driven venture capital fund supporting the growth of innovative sustainable ocean related businesses listeners may remember Patrick breeding who was on our show last year to talk about Marin SK care and its clinically proven formula that uses glycoproteins from Main lobsters to treat eczema and dry damaged skin this company has since become wildly successful with their lobster lotion and Patrick is inviting listeners to a 20% discount on their products by using the coupon code happy planet on their website Marin skincare I actually use this product myself and I highly recommend it for a blue economy to thrive people need to use more sustainable products but which products and will consumers actually adopt them innovators like you are hustling to figure this out spark number n can tell you if there's demand for your product spark markets your product before it's built using online advertising so you launch smarter have a big idea vet it with spark before you build visit spark online at www spark n9c or find them on LinkedIn hey and I want to give a a quick shout out to all of the blue economy folks out there do not miss the ocean evation Festival on June 19th and 20th in the ha Netherlands join over 450 Global innovators investors and experts transforming the blue economy for a healthier ocean for more information visit their website ocean innovation. live welcome back to the podcast what about permitting I mean is a hard to get permits to put these types of structures in well I think unfortunately permitting regulation has not caught up with where we are now and I think that's changing we see I mean there's huge Advocates out there that are working to get the policy more in line with this but policy moves slow and um the regulations are driven by that policy and so sometimes it's in certain situations it can be hard to get these types of things permitted because people are just used to putting up a bulkhead so in a lot of places that bulkhead may be the easier thing to do permitting wise just go above mean high water put a wall in and that solves your problem right the problem is it may not be as resilient as you think it is have have you had other sorts of push back along the way I understand that the permitting can sometimes be difficult God knows you know even just getting oyster Farm permit was a very long struggle yeah I think things are getting easier like I mentioned before people didn't trust the nature but now people are seeing the benefits of that but you know there's still some questions from people you know it's like well I know that if I put a big structure here it's going to be stable right how stable is the oyster Reef going to be you know over long term is that really going to protect my Shoreline you know and I think as people see that working I think it's going to be adopted more but people kind of have to see it and the it takes a little while to see that happen but we have a structure that we we put out early on that has been hit by Major hurricanes on the open Gulf Coast and just adjacent to it were Rock structures rock breakwaters that have been out there since the 90s well Cat 4 hurricane hits right at this site The Rock Breakwater the tops of them were sheared off the land was scoured out eroded back but where these oyster reefs were not a single one moved and the land behind it was protected amazing and so as people see more of that they're going to say okay I get it I I would like that not just because it works it's beautiful it's more in line with nature like there's it's more cost effective because when you're building when you're overbuilding these big structures they're extremely expensive and you might be able to do a nature-based solution for a third of the cost we have to invite nature back in exactly um so we can coexist yeah you know I'm very optimistic about how we're going to adapt you know I think we we're realizing that we've got some issues to address here but when I when I see the young people and I talk to young people most people are very aware that there there's an issue here and most want to do something about it and that's very encouraging and as as we develop more Technologies in this there's a whole category now called nature Tech that's that's sprung up and and it's out of this need to solve problems in nature like this and I think there there's growing awareness but there's also a growing movement towards developing Technologies in this space when we came into this space there was not very many competitors and we're seeing more and more competitors and we see that as a positive thing because it's all going to build right and I think that as we put more Minds behind this as more interest and resources go into this there are going to be things possible that we never thought possible that happen in this space I'm for sure of that and so as we look forward I'm I'm very hopeful that we're we're going to live learn to live in more harmony with nature instead of battling it constantly and feeling like it's overtaking us or we're overtaking it well I I think about what you're doing and it makes me think just to create some like equivalencies you know you're sort of like the the gut bacteria of coastal resilience or the phase of coastal resilience where we're looking to human health and um and immune systems like alternatives to um some of our practices with you know antibiotics let's not use antibiotics let's not try to solve these Coastal problems with steel walls but let's look at how we can harness the power of nature to help have a better impact and happier outcome so it's very cool I I think that's a really interesting way to put it and I think that it's as we learn more I think we're definitely going to get to the point where we can say yeah these types of actions set off another set of reactions we're switching the equilibrium of the system you have a degrading uh system how do you switch it into a prograding healthy resilient system and we're we're learning how to do that more and more it's not just God's work yeah it's our work to get this to help nature that's right so Matt this is a business podcast so can you tell me a little bit about the money what is how does the breakdown what kind of Revenue can you make from one of these projects well you know the projects are getting bigger and you know I think I mentioned before about how much of the shoreline is being hardened and if you look at that it's like 100 miles a year is being hardened just in the United States and that's that's new construction and so that's projects that people are putting up bulkheads or revetments and if you look at that that's 25 to 50 million a year just in that but then if you look at the jobs that are coming out that that are in addition to that regular hardening regularly you're seeing these hundred million jobs you know in the Great Lakes they just built um $160 million Shoreline protection project wow multiple cities have multi-million even billion dollar projects that are for resilience and stabilizing those shorelines rebuilding reefs um in Puerto Rico there's there's a $40 million FEMA uh project that that's out there to restore the reefs and you're seeing more these come up um over time and so it's if you look at Reef restoration globally if you look at the numbers the UN is putting out and and the G20 it's in the trillions wow of just the restor what it's going to take to do that restoration yeah so you may be hiring I know where to go looking for a job um well that's amazing it's it's really heartening to hear that there's there's good money in doing good like I find that so exciting I just find that so exciting you know you don't have to be selling sugared cereals to people you can actually be doing something really positive in nature that is that's a win-win definitely definitely and I I think that it it makes good sense to do it right just like when we built the railroads here it made good sense to build railroads cuz we wanted to create Commerce that was doing good then now doing good is building back our our natural infrastructure yeah I think that's really important to mention too because I think you know we're really you know the you know it feels like we've done a big whack over the head to nature but you know some of that the yearly intentions wasn't you know was to do good and we just went too far so you know I mean gas and oil we all want to get rid of it but gas and oil at that time Shrunk the world it created heated homes it made us safer it did all these wonderful things we just went too far and now we have to you know retract and and and repair but I I think that's a really nice um you know way to put it because I think that you know we're at another one of these Frontiers where we're going to have some radical change and we're going to make some mistakes along the way too that other future gener gener ation are going to have to repair but um but it's it's it's all there's more give and take than I think people want to give give credit for in some of the our analysis absolutely so tell me a little bit what inspired you to get into all of this well I mentioned that I I fell in love with the ocean with um diving on reefs and just being in the water and you know growing up around the water seeing the communities that made their living on the water it's something that hits me deep down in my soul to be honest and when when I was younger I wanted to beet a marine biologist and then I learned that I was I was good at math and and solving problems and I well you know I can actually be an active participant in solving some of these things um and and so yeah it's been a journey ever since but it's always kind of gone back to like how do we how do we come up with solutions for the environment but also the people that are living in those environments and depend on those environments yeah where where's your company now you've got a couple big clients you've got like big you know household Dame clients what are your plans are you raising money so we just finished our seed round and so with that money we're we're scaling up our mainly our production capabilities and so we just opened up a resilience Center in south Louisiana and we're we're industrializing our our processes and and scaling it up as we're doing that you know we're we're learning a lot too about what does that look like to scale where you know as a from a business perspective what's the lwh hanging fruit that we get the biggest bang for a buck out of yeah you know and and how do we um how do we just start refining and ticking away at those things that are just going to make us more efficient and and able to produce more consistently and uh at at larger and larger scales and I think that that is how we're going to move the needle too in the industry is as we make this more efficient we're competing with the traditional Solutions and we're seeing more and more how we can from a cost perspective outcompete the tradition Solutions and that's that when you start hitting people's bottom line of like yeah we can do this not only better but cheaper it's it's not really even a sale at that point it sells itself right but I mean these all these all these Environmental Solutions have to make economic sense they can't just be that's right you know be luxury items otherwise we'll never get very far yeah I'd like to ask everybody who comes on the show uh if they're op optimistic about our future to stay ahead of the climate pressures what do you think you're in the middle of it yeah well I I think I I said it a minute ago I'm very optimistic and it is very encouraging to see the the Tailwinds that we're getting you know we are starting to get a lot more people looking into this space and and the most exciting thing is the young people who are looking to this area you know a lot lot of my colleagues in other Industries are talking about how hard it is to find labor and we haven't had that problem because people really want to work in this space they see the problems that are out there and they want to solve them and if we have that kind of Interest going into the future I think we're going to solve these problems and they might get to dive on a coral reef and they might get to dive on a coral reef job it's hard to argue with that I don't know Investment Banking or building Coral race um well that's great I like that and uh for some of those young people that are starting businesses today and are interested in this nature Tech what kind of advice do you have for them well I would say keep keep going don't let others tell you it can't be done because they probably have never done it and uh there will be a lot of people that tell you you can't do it and you just need to keep moving forward and uh as as you do that you'll find like-minded people that will encourage you along the way and uh before you know it you might even be starting a whole movement so keep uh keep moving forward and don't listen to your teachers don't listen to your teachers that's right that was that was so interesting and I really wish you well with all of this keep on building those beautiful beautiful coral reefs thank you AB it pleasure it may be counterintuitive to think about building a reef in order to protect your house from the ocean but it may actually be the best solution there is natrix is demonstrating time and again that harnessing the power of nature can be an incredible tool in building resilience in our Coastal communities to learn more about Matt and natrix feel free to check out our show notes thank you once again for listening please follow happy Planet wherever you tune in and leave us a rating and review it really does help new listeners discover the show Happy planet was reported and hosted by me Abigail Caroll I'm also the executive producer Kendra Hannah is our sound editor and composer George brandle agoff created our theme music learn more about my work and get in touch by visiting happyplanet podcast.com