AWARD YEAR
2017
CATEGORY
Work
GOALS
Life On Land
KEYWORDS
biodiversity, food preservation, sustainability
COUNTRY
United States of America
DESIGNED BY
Bren Smith, GreenWave
WEBSITE
http://greenwave.org/
GreenWave
Designed to restore ocean ecosystems, mitigate climate change & create blue-green jobs.
GreenWave founder Bren Smith has now perfected a vertical ocean farming system that only grows restorative crops, such as seaweed and shellfish, to produce food, fertilizer, animal feed, cosmetics and biofuel.
Each species is carefully selected to address a certain environmental challenge, such as fixing excess nitrogen, in the case of oysters, or seaweed that soaks up carbon dioxide. Requiring zero input, such as fertilizer, these farms are designed to have a negative carbon footprint. They are also working to train a new generation of farmers whose production model will have a restorative environmental impact. GreenWave has created an open source model that anyone in the world is free to replicate. Kelp soaks up five times as much carbon as land-based plants while oysters filter 50 gallons of water a day, pulling out nitrogen, according to Smith. Smith said GreenWave is capable of producing 30 times more biofuel than soybeans.