MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – The impacts of climate change are being felt worldwide, from the devastating wildfires out west to the more powerful hurricanes we saw ravage the Gulf Coast over the summer, but here at home a local tech startup has launched a powerful new weapon to help us become more resilient.
Off the waters of Biscayne Bay, along the shoreline of a posh Miami Beach residential island, a brand new sea wall is being installed.
It’s not being built using ordinary concrete slabs though. This is the future.
“I think it’s a radical change,” said Anya Freeman, founder and CEO of Kind Designs. “I think this method of manufacturing makes much more sense for seawalls.”
Kind Designs is a brand new tech start up making waves with their ground breaking innovation.
“This is one of our walls,” said Kind Designs project leader and environmental scientist Maddie Rieger. “You can see the mangrove roots that start at the top all the way down.”
They’re called Living Sea Walls, made out pH neutral sustainable concrete, which is produced way faster than traditional slabs by using state of the art 3-D printing robots.
“We print in one hour what used to take a day in precast,” said Freeman.
And the best part is they not only strengthen resiliency and protect property, but they’re also designed to be kind to the environment.
“So you get a greater amount of biodiversity that can live on and around this wall because of the design of the walls,” said Rieger.
The walls are textured, using biomimicry to create features that imitate what would naturally appear in the ecosystem, like the one in Miami Beach designed with mangrove roots, providing habitat for marine life.
“If a marine organism can grip onto this, it protects them from wave action and predators, and then you get these deep caves, so you can almost fit your entire arm in here, so we’ve seen juvenile fish species hiding in there,” said Rieger.
This is the brain child of Freeman, a Ukrainian-born University of Miami Law School graduate turned innovator, after witnessing climate change impact her adopted home of Miami Beach.
“I’ve been here 15 years, and there’s a very big difference from the day I arrived (to) today in the frequency of flooding,” she said. “The amount of flooding, that’s why cities are passing code to keep requiring higher and higher sea walls protect the coast.”
Traditionally, sea walls are typically made of concrete. They’re built parallel to the shore to protect against coastal erosion.
They’re very expensive to produce, and usually only last 30 to 40 years before they biodegrade, leeching toxins like chloride into the water that are very harmful to the marine environment.
That’s where Freeman saw opportunity, researching a new, more eco-friendly and economical way to bring to market the next generation of seawalls, a living one.
“By utilizing 3-D printing technology, we can make sea walls more affordable and incorporate a biomimicry design, so it’s not a flat wall that’s leaching chemicals destroying marine habitats. The Living sea wall becomes, in itself, a marine habitat.
Using $6 million of investor seed money, within the year Freeman had acquired warehouse space, three robots, and team of 20 employees.
They deployed their first seawall at a waterfront on Pinetree Drive nine months ago and already there are signs of life underwater.
“Now we’re seeing oyster larva, tube worms, barnacles, and this grazing algae is essential for manatees that are coming through, and they love to feed on the grazing algae,” said Rieger.
Added Freeman: “It’s doing amazing. We see filter feeders and a lot of fish and a lot of activity in the area. So it’s been extremely successful.”
The walls are built to code and priced competitively against traditional concrete seawalls. Freeman calls it a win-win. A win for the homeowner and a major win for the planet.
“You can have the same exact budget for your sea wall, where you can install something that’s beautiful and something that’s amazing for the marine environment and will improve the quality of water,” said Freeman. “Basically, your backyard becomes like an aquarium.”
So far in the past year, since its launch, Kind Designs has deployed 60 living seawalls, all on five different private properties, but they also have government contracts in the pipeline. They’ll be installing in the city of Bay Harbor Islands and the city of Longboat Key on the west coast in the coming months.
For more info on these living seawalls, visit www.kinddesigns.com.