Happy Planet Wednesday! Pack your bags, we're headed to Kenya! This week we'll be speaking to Anga Mbeyiya, a South African seaweed entrepreneur whose company, Ole Blu, is transforming seaweed into biostimulants to help rural farmers adapt to climate change.While her company is still young, it's also already having a big impact both socially and economically. They're buying seaweed from a woman run cooperative seaweed farm, running demo farms themselves, and working with well over 400 sm...

Happy Planet Wednesday! If you live on the coast, this is a podcast you might want to pay special attention to. Matt Campbell, President of NatrX, is joining us today to talk about his nature-based solutions for building coastal resilience. Thinking you need to protect your community from rising sea levels? Rather than building a wall along the coastline, Matt thinks you might have better results looking to solutions off-shore where you can harness the power of nature to build...

Happy Planet Wednesday! This week's guest, Elizabeth (Liz) Muller is Co-Founder of Deep Isolation. While living in France, was impressed by France's nuclear power program, which provides nearly 70% of the country's power, with zero carbon emissions. The problem was, and it still is, the waste. Today, over 490,000 metric tons of nuclear waste is located in above ground temporary storage. And no spent nuclear fuel anywhere in the world has yet been placed in a permanent reposito...

Happy Planet Wednesday!   With all of the good work that oysters can do for the planet, filtering water, preventing erosion, reducing acidification, mitigating storm surge and more, entrepreneur George Birch wanted to see if an oyster living in the water doing all of those good deeds could be more valuable in terms of dollars or euros than an oyster on your plate.   George's business is called Oyster Heaven and with the help of European credit programs, he is proving his thesis. The euros are...

We are kicking off the season with the unstoppable Brian Skerry.  Brian is a world renown photojournalist and film producer specializing in marine wildlife and underwater environments. He has won the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition no less than ELEVEN TIMES. He is a National Geographic Society Storytelling Fellow and author of a dozen books.Brian’s 2021 book, Secrets of the Whales, was released by National Geographic as part of a multi-platform project that included...

Happy Planet Wednesday !  Before I introduce our guest today I want to thank you for your support over the past year. Because, yes, today’s podcast concludes our first year of programming!  To celebrate we venture into Africa. We will be speaking with Klaartje (Klara) Scarde the Co-Founder of Mwani Zanzibar, a seaweed based cosmetics company based in Zanzibar, Tanzania. I would have loved to do this podcast on site! Klaartje left her banking job in London to fully embrace the seaweed...

Happy Planet Wednesday!  This week we are joined by Vincent Doumeizel, a French native from Burgundy who is Director of the Food Program for Lloyd's Register Foundation as well as an expert on everything seaweed. Vincent has spearheaded the Global Seaweed Coalition, which "is a global partnership established to support the safety and sustainability of the seaweed industry as it scales up and to unite a fragmented market through a unified vision and goals." Most recently Vincent published...

Happy Planet Wednesday !  We are headed to Iceland today to meet Thor Sigfusson the Founder of Iceland Ocean Cluster, an innovation hub he founded in 2011 to focus on marine startups. Since then Ocean Clusters have been popping up around the world, including the New England Ocean Cluster right here in Portland, Maine.  It’s a real delight to have Thor on the show as he has been at the forefront of what is now a quite sizeable ocean innovation movement. Thor is also the author of several...

Happy Planet Wednesday ! We've talked quite a bit about renewable energy on this podcast and we've also looked at old technologies that are coming back, often with a modern twist. Our guest today is starting a business that checks both of those boxes. Miles Keeney-Ritchie, founder of Aloft, aims to reduce ocean transportation carbon emissions by installing their automated fiberglass sails on ships and ferries to take some of the burden off the engine and reduce fuel consumption. Thanks to...

Today, we are hopping over the Atlantic to speak with Louise Skajem and Aura Murillo, two young, UK-based women designers who are innovating in a marine area I never imagined I would discuss on this show: funerary services. These young women are full of life and will challenge everything you have ever come to believe about funeral directors. Their company, the aptly named Resting Reefs, proposes to use human ashes, mix them with oyster shell powder, which is very high in calcium carbonate and...

You may recognize today’s guest from episode 5. We’re here with Bernard Hidier, the French expat living in Maine who co-founded Finsulate the non-toxic antifouling solution that looks like velvet and mimics a sea urchin.  Bernard is back with us because somehow he has managed to co-found and co-manage more than one company at the same time. “Kids do not try this at home!”  If you remember, Bernard is originally from Brittany France and that is where KarrGreen hails from. Karrgreen is a...

We are going to kick off the fall season with a chat with Dan Watson, the UK-based founder and CEO of a fisheries startup called SafetyNet. I first met Dan through Harry Wright’s accelerator Bright Tide, where I am an advisor. Then I wound up on his mentor team for another accelerator run by Boston-based Sea Ahead. I can’t wait to see where our paths next cross! One of Dan’s most talked about solutions is designed to prevent bycatch. Bycatch refers to unwanted fish that are inadvertently...

Fashion and smelly seaweed may seem like an odd pair but one company in North Carolina is spinning them together - quite literally! Our guest is Laura Hayes and she is the Senior Strategic Partnerships Manager at Keel Labs.  Keel Labs makes a natural silky yarn that is composed of about 70% kelp! While they are not the first to try to make fashion fibers out of seaweed, when it comes to seaweed usage and natural ingredients, I haven't heard of anyone coming close to their success.  The market...

Happy Planet Wednesday ! We are travelling to South America this week ! Our guest, Daniela Allerbon, is CEO of Aquit, a company specializing in natural proteins that can be used to replace antibiotics in fish farming. Aquit was founded by researchers in Chile and Daniela recently joined the team as CEO from Buenos Aires, Argentina. We learn a lot about antibiotics and fish farming in this podcast, but we also get a fascinating window into the startup ecosystem in South America and...

Happy Planet Wednesday !  Our guest today is Jeremy McKane, Founder of Ocean Currency Network whose mission is to create an ocean map with real-time ocean data. The goal is to map 30% of the ocean by 2030. Sound ambitious? It is. But as Jeremy say in the podcast, if we can’t see the problems, we can’t fix them. Getting real time data will give us the information we need to find solutions. Jeremy kicks off this interview with a reference to the Tragedy of the Commons. Commons refers to shared...

Today we are going to dig into seafood with our guest Jennifer Bushman. She’s going to help us better understand how the bounty of the ocean fits into our diets as well as our national food security plan and a healthier planet.  Jennifer Bushman is a sustainable seafood expert, communicator, and strategist who has been championing ethical aquaculture for more than two decades. She has been on a mission to transform the food system, preserve the oceans, nourish the world’s ever-growing...

This podcast marks our 30th episode which seems like something to celebrate! So thank you for tuning in! If you like what we’re doing here, please spread the word.  We have traveled the world together on this podcast, but today’s guest is located right here where I am, in the great state of Maine! Stuart Davies joins us today to speak about ORPC or the Ocean Renewable Power Company. ORPC is building modular, eco-friendly hydropower units fit for rivers and oceans.  Unlike wind or sun,...

Happy Planet Wednesday !  Many of you, especially those who love the Caribbean, are aware of what is now called the sargassum belt, a 5,000 mile long belt of floating sargassum seaweed mass that stretches from the Gulf of Mexico all of the way to Africa, hitting the South East coast of the United States along the way. In normal doses, sargassum is a healthy macro algae that provides a habitat for sea life and sequesters carbon from the atmosphere. But an overabundance began in 2011 and has...

The fashion industry is at odds with the survival of our planet.  Ten percent of total global carbon emissions derive from the fashion industry, as much as the whole European Union. The industry is polluting our rivers, streams, and oceans. Meanwhile some 80% of our discarded textiles are either incinerated or wind up in trash heaps each year, usually in places like Ghana which are fast becoming dumps for the North.  But clothes bring us protection, safety, and, well, joy. We can’t live...

You may recall that in Episode 12 we spoke about hydrogen fuel cell stacks. It was a very popular episode so I wanted to dig into the theme a bit more. As such, today we’re going to dig into green hydrogen itself. Just a reminder that GREEN hydrogen is hydrogen derived from a renewable-energy powered electrolysis process that splits water molecules, H20, into their components H2, hydrogen and O, oxygen.  One of the challenges of creating green hydrogen is the water source. Historically, for...

As I think you know by now, I believe technology can solve most things - but sometimes the right tech just can’t come fast enough, and in the meantime, the most innovative tool at our disposal may be good old fashioned dialogue.  Such is the case in Maine where a dwindling population of the large and lumbering North Atlantic Right Whale has pitted lobster fishers and environmentalists against each other. The environmentalists say gear entanglements are largely responsible for the spiralling...

Our guest today is Benjamin Sorkin, Founder of Flux Marine, a Rhode Island-based company innovating electric outboard motors. I was invited to visit Ben’s shop back in January following a conference organized by the Blue Venture Forum. I was impressed by what I saw.  Ben and his team have taken electric propulsion technology a long way from when I first looked for an electric outboard for my oyster farm back in 2010. Needless to say at that point, I didn’t find a solution that fit my...

Today we’re going to dive into the world of marine research.  Our guest is Deborah Bronk, President and CEO of Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, a Maine-based marine research institute specializing in ocean microbes like algae, plankton, viruses, and bacteria. Bigelow Laboratory is a relatively small institute but it's growing fast and having a global impact. Under Deborah's leadership,  interdisciplinarity reigns. Deborah believes in removing silos in ocean research and encouraging the...

A number of listeners have reached out with questions about how to get involved in angel investing.  So in this episode I speak to one of the most experienced and articulate angel investors I know.  Our guest is Adam de Sola Pool, a Venture Capitalist by trade who now has over $1M in angel investments of his own. I met Adam through a blue technology angel investment group in Boston called BlueAngels, which is part of SeaAhead, Boston’s premier marine accelerator and investment platform. If...