For more than 20 years, Corwin Bell has been on a mission to save the honeybees.
In 2005, after a decade of refining his beekeeping hobby, he launched BackYardHive in Eldorado Springs, Colorado. Besides selling beekeeping accessories and build-your-own hive supplies, the blueprints for which he designs, the site provides learning tools that act as an alternative to conventional beekeeping methods. Bell believes that by arming people with a convenient, actionable way to combat one of the greatest environmental challenges of our time, we can help honeybees survive and thrive — and do so right from our own backyards.
Though the rates of Colony Collapse Disorder — first identified in 2006 after colonies of worker bees mysteriously disappeared — have declined in recent years, honeybee populations continue to be threatened by pesticides, mite infestation, low genetic diversity and climate change.
In 2017, beekeepers across the U.S. lost 40 percent of their colonies, which Bell attributes in part to extreme temperature shifts that are occurring more and more frequently.
To that end Bell, who had already been making hives based on the traditional top-bar design, eventually invented what he calls the “cathedral hive” to help bees survive cold winters and preserve their genetics.
Aside from saving bees, Bell’s bigger vision includes educating more backyard beekeepers. Through BackYardHive, he offers bee guardianship courses ranging from the beginner level to intensive, hands-on workshops.
“We have bee guardians all over the U.S., and for sure all over the world, that are creating this extended habitat for the bees,” he says.
Watch the video above to learn more about the plight of the modern honeybee and how Bell’s efforts are helping this very vulnerable population.
Category: Preserving the Environment
How Kayakers Saved a River and Started a Movement
While most mines in the eastern region of the Appalachian Mountains are no longer in operation, they are far from inactive.
In lightly populated places such as Albright, West Virginia, water with heavy metals seeps from mines into tributaries — the small streams that flow into rivers — finally pooling in reservoirs near the Chesapeake Bay. It’s also here where a group of kayakers made it their mission over 20 years ago to clean up one of the most polluted rivers in America: the Cheat River, a 78.3-mile tributary that runs through eastern West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. And they’re still at it today.
Jim Snyder, a 64-year-old thrill-seeker who lives on the banks of the Cheat River near Albright, was one of those initial kayakers.
“The pollution there would burn your eyes,” Snyder says, recalling the condition of the river in the mid- to late-’90s, when a series of underground coal mine blowouts released orange-tinged water thick with heavy metals into the river.
The first blowout, in 1994, lowered the pH of the water to dangerous levels, killing off fish as far away as 16 miles downstream. Another blowout a year later eventually devastated the area’s tourism industry, known for its whitewater recreation. The Cheat River soon after became ranked as one the nation’s most endangered.
To reckon with the pollution and damage to the river’s ecosystem, Snyder and other kayakers in the community formed Friends of the Cheat to clean up the dirty streams and creeks that fed into the Cheat River. Their efforts helped the river recover and, with it, a tourism industry centered around its rapids.
“I’d never done much work on committees at that time so it was an awkward fit for me, but we kept making it work,” Snyder tells NationSwell. “We were rookies, but we endured.”
After the mine blowouts, the whitewater industry suffered from more than a 50 percent drop in business, while whitewater participation increased nationally by 33 percent during the same time period.
“Twenty-thousand people were going down the canyon annually in the ’80s and ’90s,” says Owen Mulkeen, associate director of Friends of the Cheat. “Albright [became] a ghost town compared to what it was like at the height of rafting.”
Friends of the Cheat led an effort with the Environmental Protection Agency to use various methods of water treatment, such as limestone filtration, to clean up the tributaries in the area. The success Snyder and the others had with bringing back the Cheat River became widely considered one of the most successful conservation stories.
“[Kayakers] have a passion and that usually keeps them in West Virginia,” says Mulkeen. “We are blessed with the natural beauty and recreation here.”
And that has helped keep the organization’s ranks filled — a necessity, given that mine pollution is still a very real problem in the waters around the Cheat.
Over 7,500 miles of streams in Appalachia are still polluted by heavy metals from abandoned mines, according to data collected by Friends of the Cheat. Before the passage of the Surface Mining and Reclamation Control Act in 1977, mining companies could seal their operations in whatever way they liked, with little or no oversight. And over the decades many of those seals have busted open.
“Mining had a huge impact on the industrial revolution, and allowed us to win or at least participate in two wars,” says Gavin Pellitteri, a recreational kayaker and outreach specialist for the nonprofit Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation. “There’s a lot of that culture and pride left in the area.”
Pellitteri’s coalition works to correct for acid mine drainage, known as AMD. Similar to Friends of the Cheat, EPCAMR’s treatment strategy is to find an empty piece of land that can be filled with mine water into a pondlike basin. Limestone is used to neutralize the water’s acidity, and exposure to oxygen removes iron and drives off sulfates. Once done, the clean water is put back into a river.
“If you look at where these impacts are, it’s the spine of Appalachia — Northern Georgia, Tennessee, West Virginia, up to Pennsylvania,” says Pellitteri, who estimates that there are over 400 billion gallons of mine water in the Scranton, Pennsylvania, area alone.
As water conservationists like Snyder and Pellitteri continue to clean up the area’s waterways, where a virtually endless flow of polluted water streams from abandoned mines, there’s a fear that they’ll fail to attract a younger generation of outdoor activists to the mission.
“Unfortunately, there’s a brain-drain out of West Virginia,” Mulkeen says. “But we’re born and bred by paddlers, and we hope to continue that relationship. That’s our base.”
Because unlike a tree falling in the forest, a blown-out mine will matter, even if no one is around to witness it.
Giving Coral Reefs New Life
Coral Vita is an environmental startup with a huge mission: to grow coral and then transplant it back into the ocean as a way to shore up dying reefs. Doing so also helps the communities, industries and nations that depend on healthy reefs for things like food, coastal protection and income.
Through a process called micro-fragmenting, Coral Vita breaks coral into tiny pieces, plants them on coral farms, and then watches as the coral fragments grow at an expedited pace — up to 40 times faster than they would naturally on the ocean floor.
Watch the video above to see how the team from Coral Vita is restoring our reefs, one piece at a time.
Can Religion Save the Environment?
Evangelical Christians and climate change? The two aren’t usually mentioned in the same breath, unless referring to the former as staunch and outspoken deniers of the latter.
Like the origins of life itself, the notion of man-made climate change is one that frequently puts religious conservatives at odds with the scientific community. And despite the fact that 97 percent of climate scientists agree the threat of ecological disaster at the hands of humans is real, just over a quarter of white evangelicals believe the same. Even less believe in climate reform.
This puts the small cohort of eco-conscious Christians in a bind: How do they convince their fellow worshippers that the earth is warming due to human activity, that it will disproportionately affect the poor, and that evangelicals have a role to play in stopping it?
“There’s a lot in the Christian faith that is chock-full of evidence of God’s love for the world that he created, and particularly in the non-human world,” says Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, a national organizer and spokesperson for Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. “Faith and a concern for the environment tend to get pitted against each other and get associated with one side of the aisle or the other. We don’t have to bridge these two seemingly disparate concerns because they are the same concerns.”
Meyaard-Schaap and others in the so-named creation-care movement are facing an uphill battle, if numerous studies are right. Two years ago, for example, evolutionary biologist Josh Rosenau dug into a massive 2007 Pew Research Center survey on America’s religious beliefs. He created a chart that examined the relationship between a denomination’s acceptance of evolution and the degree to which it supports stricter environmental regulations.
Rosenau found that the more a religion dismisses evolution in favor of creationism, the more its members push back against government action on climate change.
But while evangelicals’ religious beliefs inform their views on climate change, it’s their politics that might be more responsible for their attitudes — especially where environmental regulations affect the fossil fuel industry. (To wit: Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin’s christening of Oct. 13 as “Oilfield Prayer Day.”)
That entangling of religion, science and politics has become a hallmark of the current administration, perhaps most visibly in the appointment of Scott Pruitt, a former Sunday school teacher and deacon, to sit atop the Environmental Protection Agency. Just as he once said there aren’t “sufficient scientific facts to support the theory of evolution,” Pruitt has made no bones about his dismissal of man-made climate change. In a February interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he alleged that unfettered development of the nation’s energy reserves is rooted in Scripture.
That view is in line with most evangelicals, who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. For many of the faithful, earth was created for human “dominion” — a word found in Genesis and used often in the argument against human-led climate change.
But that kind of literal reading of the Bible is problematic — and misguided — says Rev. Mitch Hescox, a leading voice in the creation-care movement.
“There are some very conservative people who believe that humanity’s right to use the earth is biblical, and correcting that understanding is my number one job,” says Hescox, who also serves as president of the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN). He adds that the church has long ignored creation-care.
Creation-care isn’t a new movement — EEN was founded in 1993 — but it has gotten more attention in recent years as prominent religious leaders, such as Pope Francis, have agitated on behalf of environmentalism and balked at the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. And from its beginnings, creation-care has pushed a human-centric message whereas liberal-leaning groups might focus on more abstract concepts like melting glaciers and eroding coastlines.
“We’ve never been climate deniers; we’ve acknowledged it was real, but it didn’t ever impact [our] day-to-day life,” say Dave and Lonna Schaap, Kyle Meyaard-Schaap’s parents, who were convinced to pay attention to climate change by their son’s campaign. “We have other values. We care for the poor, for orphans, for those in prison. And we’ve always been taught to care for those things.”
Hescox says the focus on people is where those in the left-leaning environmental movement get lost in relaying the message.
“What liberals don’t get is that faithful conservatives have a different value system,” Hescox says. “Trying to get conservative folks to care about polar bears is the wrong issue. And where maybe people like polar bears, people will not change their life over a polar bear. People will, though, change their life when you start helping them understand how fossil-fuel pollution affects children around the world.”
Still, that doesn’t mean EEN and other groups have found it easy to convert the faithful. According to an analysis by the nonpartisan think-tank New America, it’s a battle of David-and-Goliath proportions, where eco-conscious evangelicals just don’t have the resources or organization and lobbying power to go head-to-head with opposing groups — groups like the Christian Right, for example, whose network of outspoken evangelical leaders have pushed back against the environmental activism of their fellow followers.
The reason? It’s political.
“First, evangelicals’ political partners saw Creation Care as a menace for economic conservatives and opponents of environmental regulation, and did not hesitate to let evangelicals know it,” concluded the New America report. “Second, the evangelical old guard saw the Creation Care activists as threatening their role as the arbiter of evangelicalism’s political engagement.”
Another Pew study likewise found that once you take political leanings out of the conversation, there are only a few areas where deeply religious individuals actually digress from conventional scientific thinking.
And that’s news that Meyaard-Schaap, Hescox and others in the creation-care movement can use, especially where younger evangelicals are concerned.
In the past six years, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, the group Meyaard-Schaap helps lead, has grown from 18 people signing a call to action to currently reaching over 10,000 youth, he says.
“A lot of conservative lawmakers are the ones holding up on the progress of climate change from a policy position, and most conservative lawmakers rely on evangelicals to keep their seat,” says Meyaard-Schaap. “So now we’re using our voice to say, ‘You’ve depended on the support of our community to keep your seat and be a member of Congress, and you have to continue relying on our support. So now you have to pay attention.’”
A Healthy Alternative to Traditional Wall Paint
The average house paint is linked to cancer, asthma and Sick Building Syndrome — not to mention multiple environmental issues. So why do people keep using it?
“They have no idea what’s in it,” says Michael Aiken. “At the end of the day, if it doesn’t smell too terrible, they think it’s probably OK.”
Aiken’s start-up, Romabio, has created an alternative to acrylics that don’t stir up health risks or additional problems for the planet. Its mineral paints and plasters are free of toxins. They’re odorless and mold-resistant. They’re even made from natural raw materials.
“When you hear something’s made with a synthetic chemical, you have to believe there’s a better solution in nature,” Aiken says.
He didn’t grow up planning to revolutionize the paint world. As an undergrad at Randolph-Macon College, Aiken loved science but “just did OK” in chemistry. Medical school didn’t pan out. “Since I’m a pretty big talker, people kept saying, ‘You should go into sales,’” Aiken recalls. He found his entrepreneurial spirit a good fit for the commercial real estate and finance industries.
Flash ahead to 2009. Married with three kids, Aiken was preparing to paint his Decatur, Georgia, house. A friend told him about an unusual, all-natural paint. It wasn’t sold at a big-box store but only available in a 1,000-square-foot shop tucked behind an architect’s office. Curious, Michael checked it out.
The store wasn’t impressive — there were only a few racks and a tint machine. But Aiken’s conversation with the owner, Chris Lewis, was. The two men talked acrylic paint and its devastating effect on the environment. Lewis explained how the nontoxic, solvent-free paint he sold had been created by an Italian chemist, Patrizio Betti, based on ancient methods that date back to the Etruscans.
Aiken left with enough natural paint to cover the interior of his home — and a gut instinct that more people needed to know about it.
He and Lewis went into business together. Over the next few years, they kept encouraging Betti to create more durable and even cleaner paint formulations. Then Aiken used his business acumen to introduce their products to the building trade.
This year, Romabio supplied interior paint for one of Google’s recent developments in Sunnyvale, California, and a skyscraper in Beijing. Cans of its products are sold in home-improvement stores across Europe, as well as Benjamin Moore dealers and Home Depots throughout the U.S.
In the meantime, Aiken’s mission is to go even greener. Romabio has plans to ship its products in biodegradable plastic buckets. Leftover paint may no longer need to be treated like hazardous waste but will instead biodegrade through a new technology the company has been working on for the past year.
Aiken is, after all, a big picture guy. The best part of his job? Being part of a venture that “drives humanity forward,” he says.
Creating Food Out of Thin Air
Lisa Dyson is on a journey to revolutionize the way protein is made. “We have a lot of work to do,” she says.
By 2050, the world’s population is estimated to hit 10 billion. Food production will need to increase by 70 percent. Traditional farming won’t be able to keep up.
Dyson knows the answer. It’s literally all around us: carbon dioxide.
An odorless, colorless gas, CO2 is used to carbonate drinks, make dry ice and helps smother flames when put in fire extinguishers. It’s also a byproduct of burning fossil fuels — and a known culprit of climate change.
Producing food from thin air? Sounds too good to be true. That is, until you consider that Dyson holds three degrees in physics, including a Ph.D. from M.I.T., where she studied string theory. “My dream growing up was to become a scientist,” she says.
Several years ago, Dyson and a colleague, John Reed, began searching for technical solutions for climate change. They stumbled across NASA reports written in the 1960s and ’70s that discussed using powerful microbes to recycle carbon dioxide aboard spacecraft.
“We were fascinated by their research,” Dyson recalls. “We wondered if we could develop a similar technology that would enable us to recycle carbon dioxide into valuable products here on Earth.”
The answer is yes. Today, Dyson and Reed’s startup, Kiverdi, uses those microbes to transform carbon into bio-based products. The magic happens in special bio-reactors, similar to the giant urns used to brew beer.
This year, they’re commercializing a new process to transform CO2 into protein powder. The end product, called Planet+Protein, is packed with essential amino acids, vitamins and minerals, and contains over 50 percent more protein than many other non-animal-based proteins, like soy-based foods.
“Think of it like the flour you have in your kitchen,” says Dyson. “It can be mixed with other ingredients to make flavorful foods.” Burgers, pastas, smoothies … the possibilities are endless.
Not surprisingly, Planet+Protein has “an amazingly low environmental footprint,” Dyson says. “To produce it uses significantly less land and less water than most other proteins.”
By the time Planet+Protein is for sale at your local supermarket, Dyson’s hope is that it will be one of the most sustainable protein options up for grabs — but not the only one.
“A change is necessary and inevitable, given the increasing demand for protein and our continuously growing population,” she says. In the future, Dyson predicts we’ll see numerous products on store shelves that follow the same conscientious credo: an earth-friendly process that inevitably helps reduce greenhouse gases.
You don’t have to be a scientist to help stop climate change, Dyson adds. “If you have your own idea that you believe will have an impact, then jump in with both feet. You’ll discover there are so many people willing to help you.”
A New Answer to the ‘Paper or Plastic’ Question
“You can’t just throw it into the trash!”
Eight years ago, that’s how Daphna Nissenbaum’s arguments with her teenage son began. He’d finish a water bottle, then absentmindedly toss it into the garbage. The scoldings she gave him for not recycling made the Israeli mother of five think about what else was being thrown away.
“I realized plastic bottles weren’t the main issue,” Nissenbaum says.
After all, they could be recycled, when people remembered to do so. But what about all the flexible packaging — chip bags, candy wrappers and go-to containers — Nissenbaum also saw crammed into the trash?
She did some research. What she found shocked her: Most flexible packaging isn’t recycled and ends up in landfills, oceans or other places.
Unless an alternative could be found, “our children will find themselves facing mountains of plastic,” says Nissenbaum. She thought of an orange peel or apple. Once discarded, it disintegrates biologically and turns to compost. Why couldn’t packaging be engineered to do the same?
Most people would consider that a rhetorical question. Nissenbaum made it a personal challenge.
Before earning an M.B.A. in marketing and entrepreneurship, Nissenbaum graduated from the Israeli Army’s elite software engineering program. “Part of our education was thinking out of the box,” she explains. “We were trained to create something from nothing.”
In the basement of her home, Daphna began the Tipa Corporation. Funds raised from friends and family allowed her to hire bioplastic experts. Their job: to source flexible packaging materials that are biodegradable.
Nothing existed. Instead, Tipa had to develop its own. What it came up with looks like plastic. It acts like plastic. Yet when composted, the material naturally breaks down in 180 days or less.
“Plastic that turns into compost,” says Nissenbaum. “It’s a beautiful thing.”
Yet her extensive business and management background said that wasn’t enough to be successful. “If we want the mass market to cooperate and adopt compostable solutions, we have to make it easy to do,” she says.
For instance, Nissenbaum’s team engineered their patented bioplastic to meet manufacturers’ requirements and to adapt to production practices already in place. That way, there’s no need for companies to invest in new equipment.
Today, Tipa makes zippered bags, stand-up pouches and packaging for coffee, snacks and produce. Clients range from a London-based fruit-jerky company to fashion designer Stella McCartney, who’s replacing all her plastic packaging with Tipa products and recruited the company to make invitations for her 2018 runway show in Paris. Individual products like compostable sandwich bags and biodegradable garbage bags are also sold online through eco-conscious retailers like Reuseit.com.
No longer headquartered in Nissenbaum’s basement, Tipa’s 25 employees have offices in the U.S., U.K. and Israel.
Coming up with a solution to landfill waste that the world will want to adopt has been a challenge, Nissenbaum admits, but she believes compostable plastics are the answer. So do her kids. Nissenbaum has even visited their schools to share Tipa’s mission. “They’re very proud,” she says.
Fashioning Clothing in a Circular Economy
Through give-back programs, The Renewal Workshop partners with brands to source returned, damaged, defective, out-of-season or post-consumer clothing. In its own facility, these garments are cleaned, sorted and repaired — giving them new life and creating the new product category “Renewed Apparel.”
The Renewal Workshop sells all renewed apparel back to partner retailers or other merchandisers.
Laying the Ground Work for Street Solar
After seeing former Vice President Al Gore’s climate change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in 2006, Scott and Julie Brusaw wanted to do their part to help the planet. Yet they hesitated at the idea of getting solar panels.
“I pictured them on our roof and knew I wouldn’t like the look of them,” admits Julie.
Plus, the solar panels would have to be taken down anytime the roof needed to be repaired. And they’d be a pain to clean. Julie wasn’t about to climb onto the roof. She worried that Scott would fall and hurt himself if he did.
They also worried the panels would be hampered by weather troubles. The couple lives in Idaho. Every winter, wouldn’t the panels get buried under snow?
Glancing down their long driveway one day, Julie mused, “Couldn’t solar panels be on driveways and roads instead of roofs?”
“Scott laughed and said they’d be crushed, so I let the idea go,” she recalls.
But Scott couldn’t. As a kid, he’d loved playing with slot cars. Maybe the idea of electric roadways could work in real life?
A week later, the electrical engineer was thinking about how to design a protective case that could protect solar panels from the weight of cars and trucks.
“I come up with dreams, ideas, concepts and designs,” says Julie, a former counselor retired from private practice. “Scott makes them tangible and real.”
Neither of them had built a tech company from the ground up. People cautioned that their idea would never get off the ground, but Julie and Scott had a feeling they were onto something.
In 2009, their start-up company, Solar Roadways, won a contract from the U.S. Department of Transportation. A 12-foot-by-12-foot prototype was created. Next came a 108-panel parking lot on Julie and Scott’s property and a 30-panel pilot project — a pedestrian plaza — in Sandpoint, Idaho. (Another is slated for Baltimore’s Inner Harbor this spring and will be open to the public.) Civil engineering labs continue to test samples for traction, load stress and impact resistance.
The idea has come a lot farther than Julie’s initial brainstorm of solar panels on roads. “Our panels have solar cells for energy collection, heating elements to prevent snow and ice accumulation and LEDs to illuminate roads lines and provide graphics,” says Scott. They have the potential to charge in-transit electric vehicles, welcome energy from other renewable sources into the nation’s power grid and create an “intelligent road” that can actually steer, accelerate and brake autonomous vehicles.
“Imagine getting into your car and telling it to take you to the store,” says Julie. “You could take a nap while the road guides your vehicle to the store, finds a parking spot, and wakes you up.”
So far, Solar Roadways has interest from all 50 states and virtually every country in the world. Eventually, Julie and Scott hope to have manufacturing facilities throughout the globe as well.
They want to sell panels not only for roads and driveways, but for patios, bike paths, playgrounds, sidewalks, pool decks and parking lots.
The possibilities of the panels are only limited by the imagination: Flexible parking lot lines could shrink to fit motorcycles or widen to fit RVs. Handicapped spots could be created dynamically instead of dedicated by the use of paint. LED lights could illuminate lots for nighttime safety.
And imagine airport runways built with solar panels — Scott and Julie have. “We don’t know if actual runways are possible,” acknowledges Scott, “but we expect that by keeping surfaces snow and ice-free and eliminating most of the plowing needs for airports, Solar Roadways could greatly reduce flight delays due to snowy, icy conditions.”
Scott estimates there are nearly 33,000 miles of impervious surfaces in the U.S. Transform them into solar facades, and they could generate three times the electricity the nation needs. Greenhouses gases could be slashed by 75 percent.
“We honestly believe Solar Roadways is the most viable plan to help halt climate change before it’s too late,” says Julie. “We want to make this world a safer and greener place.”
Pulling Plastic From the Sea (and Recycling It Into Skateboards)
Growing up near Cape Cod, Ben Kneppers felt an affinity with the ocean. “I lived right beside a cove, where my friends and I spent all our time catching blue crabs, clamming and exploring,” he says.
It’s no surprise that Kneppers grew up to become an environmental consultant — and avid surfer. His career took him to Australia, where he befriended David Stover and Kevin Ahearn, who shared his passion for catching waves. During late-night talks, the guys always seemed to return to the topic of plastic garbage in the ocean. They were constantly surfing over, around or through it.
“We’d find ourselves asking, ‘What if we could do something about that?” remembers Kneppers.
There didn’t seem to be an answer.
In 2012, Kneppers relocated to Chile for work. When he heard a program funded by the Chilean government was looking for sustainable start-ups to fund, he remembered those conversations with his friends. “For as much doom and gloom as we cast on ocean pollution, I figured it was probably actually solvable,” Kneppers says.
He reached out to Stover and Ahearn and suggested they figure out how. Stover has financial skills and Ahearn, engineering expertise. Kneppers, for his part, “researched the heck out of” ocean plastic. He interviewed local fishermen, scrutinized coastal infrastructure, and studied behavior and design. His conclusion? “Waste is a design flaw,” Kneppers explains. “If we designed something using a circular model, we could solve the problem that we created.”
In other words, what if local fishermen could be paid to harvest plastic waste? What if it was not only fished out of the water but transformed into something of value?
Kneppers thought back to his childhood and how his prized possession was a skateboard. It would take two pounds of plastic to produce one – but it could be sold for around a hundred bucks. That volume of plastic could easily be sourced from discarded fishing nets, which make up more than 10 percent of the world’s ocean pollution.
The guys had their idea.
They named their company Bureo, which means “the waves” in the language of the Mapuche, a group of native Chileans.
Once they received funds from the start-up accelerator, Stover and Ahearn moved to Chile to get Bureo’s fishnet collection and recycling program, “Net Positiva,” up and running. Within six months, more than 6,600 pounds of abandoned fishing nets were collected.
The first (fish-shaped) skate deck, dubbed “The Minnow,” was manufactured from the upcycled debris.
Today, Net Positiva operates in dozens of villages throughout Chile. In 2017 alone, it salvaged more than 185,000 pounds of nets from the ocean.
Sidewalk cruiser skateboards were just the start. Bureo now makes sunglasses, surf fins and Frisbees. A partnership with Pokenobe Enterprises, the creator and owner of Jenga, led to the world’s first board game made from 100 percent recycled fishing nets.
Singer and environmentalist Jack Johnson’s a fan, selling Bureo products at his concerts. So is outdoor retailer Patagonia. Its corporate venture capital fund, Tin Shed Ventures, is now an investor. And Net Positiva enjoys widespread support in the Chilean villages where it operates. Although some large fishing operations now donate their nets, Bureo takes the money it would have paid fishermen to retrieve them and invests it into local community projects like improved waste management systems.
Kneppers and his wife, Gabriella, still call Chile home, while Stover and Ahearn work out of Bureo’s Ventura, Calif. headquarters. Pilot programs to capture fishing nets off the Pacific Coast are underway. Ten years from now, Kneppers hopes Bureo will be a global entity.
“I’m the dreamer guy,” he says, “always thinking of the next crazy idea.”