Transcribed by Ariana Thornton
George Thatos is the co-founder and head of design at Coastal Technologies Corp (https://coastalprotectiontechnologies.com), a startup whose mission is to deliver the most cutting-edge, effective technology to give humanity a fighting chance in the face of a rising climate crisis. Ecosystemic’s Editor-in-Chiefs Ariana Thornton and Anais Joubert chatted with George Thatos about his interest in sustainable technology, CTC’s philosophy, and the company’s latest projects.
What originally inspired you to create Coastal Technologies Corp., and did you have a passion for the coast growing up?
I’ve been very interested in the environment for my whole life. I’ve always been someone who watched YouTube videos of animals, and I’ve always been really into hiking, going fishing, catching snakes and reptiles, and understanding what’s going on in the natural world around me. So, I was definitely pretty predisposed towards focusing on a more environmental route.
I guess the next step in that progression happened when I decided to go down to New Orleans to study at Tulane University. New Orleans, as a city on the Mississippi Delta, is facing a huge array of different environmental problems. I studied environmental science at Tulane University with some of the most prestigious and most influential sediment geomorphologists in the country. There, I really started focusing my studies on deltaic systems and wetland dynamics. When I was a kid, I volunteered at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge and participated in one of the earliest TLP (Thin-Layer Placement) planting projects in the country—that’s basically just planting spartina marsh grass in an attempt to rebuild marshland using a volunteer labor. That was a pivotal project in establishing the early stages of larger-scale marsh restoration that is now a fully-fledged practice used all throughout the country.
I know New Orleans is really far below sea level, so you have like a lot of issues with flooding. So, protecting estuaries and wetlands is pivotal in reducing the threat of flooding.
Definitely. I could probably bore you for hours, talking about the complexities of New Orleans and the problems that they face, but you are correct to say that over 50% of the city is currently below sea level and that the most populated parts of the city are below sea level.
The historic engineering that has taken place in order to protect New Orleans from floods was not a long-term investment. It was very short-sighted. While it did prevent floodplain floods throughout the delta and the main stem of the Mississippi River from changing course, people later realized that annual flooding of the Mississippi delta is actually the way in which sediment is added to the delta and the land is sustained.
If you cut off the main stem of the river from flooding in either direction, there’s no new sediment being added to the landscape. Normally, there’s a dynamic equilibrium of subsidence—which is basically gravity pushing the mud down and compressing it over time—and sediment being added through floods. The sediment added through floods negates the subsidence of the mud, creating a stable, slightly-above-sea-level area of land. When you cut off the floods, there’s no sediment addition to offset the sinking of the mud. Without that sediment, the entire wetland system and the city of New Orleans is sinking constantly without anything to help build the land back up. That’s an example of how humans tried to engineer things and it backfired, and how there’s really no great solution to this problem because even if we hadn’t built those levies in the first place, then the entire delta would be pretty much uninhabitable. If there is a lesson to learn here, it’s that permanent human infrastructure is always going to be at risk in floodplain environments.
I read that Coastal Tech’s products are made to work with nature. Could you elaborate on that?
I will start out by saying that until very recently, the only real answer humans had to combat erosion and coastal land loss were hard structures. These are jetties, seawalls, groins—all these concrete or rock embankments that deflect the energy of currents and the downstream equilibrium. These are not large scaling scope, and they cause erosion because any sediment that they do accumulate on one side causes scour on the other side. Additionally, hard structures are very damaging to ecosystems. You can’t have a natural floodplain environment if there’s rocks or a giant concrete barrier in the way.
So, for years now, scientists have been advocating for a shift, a pivot, from hard structures into living shoreline. Instead of trying to block off wave energy with rocks, a living shoreline design would facilitate a natural ecosystem to form. You can utilize the wave absorption effects of native plant species in order to naturally prevent land loss and, at the same time, promote fisheries, oyster beds, and all sorts of services that these wetlands provide. Living shorelines are a great innovation.
One example of this is the first pilot project we did in Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana. If there is an area of marsh that is unstable or an avenue for coastal land loss, you might want to plant native wetland grass species there so they could colonize the area, grow, and create a natural barrier to seal up the damage.
However, if there’s a lot of waves and erosion, then how do you expect those plants to establish in the first place? If an area is suffering from erosion, that erosion has already displaced the plant communities there. So, only working within living shoreline philosophies without adding any other engineering is often not strong enough to effectively combat the forces that cause erosion. That’s where our technology comes in.
One of the technologies Coastal Tech is implementing has to do with oyster reefs in New York. How exactly does that work?
I’m extremely excited about the oyster reef technology. We’re currently in the process of fabricating the first batch of CTC (Coastal Technologies Corp) oyster reef systems and getting those in the hands of oyster growers and organizations that want to promote ecosystems in the New York area.
There’s so much room for innovation in the oyster reef landscape. The methods used now to create oyster reefs are rife with problems: they’re expensive, they’re time consuming, they’re labor intensive. One method for oyster reefs basically consists of making deals with restaurants that sell oysters: driving all over the place; accumulating the shells of oysters that were prepared for meals, either buying them or getting them for free; and putting them out in a field so that they can cure. From there, they’re basically shoveled into netted bags that are put on the sea floor. This is extremely labor intensive; I’ve done this myself. Bagging oysters with a shovel is very, very tiring. Additionally, a lot of the bags are single use plastic, so you have nets that degrade and let loose in the environment.
The other options consist of various concrete domes that people laboriously lug into wetland and put into the silt. Since they’re so heavy and lack so much surface area, they sink into the sediment as well.
Even once the reefs are in the environment, they still face problems with hypoxia, sedimentation, subsidence, and predation. Scientists have consistently stated that oyster reefs need to be elevated above the bottom of the sea, and that they need to inhabit a larger section of the water column in order to be as healthy and as resilient as possible.
Oysters are often found in sheltered wetland environments that have a silty substrate. This makes our product’s coil design, which can be driven into sediment, extremely effective. We’ve actually tested the coil’s strength in terms of poundage and over 300 pounds of upwards force—which would never occur in nature under any circumstance—are unable to dislodge the coil from silt. As time goes on, the coil only grows more and more secure as the silt sort of glues itself to the coil. In terms of perpendicular torque strength, there’s no amount that could dislodge the coil. The reefs are extremely secure.
The prototypes that we’re creating now have five stone plates that are stacked on top of each other, separated by bamboo spacers. This design maximizes surface area, allows oysters to inhabit the whole water column, and prevents predation from snails, crabs, and other organisms that mostly inhabit the silty bottom layer of the water column. You could easily install a baffle in order to discourage predators from climbing up into the reef. The plates can be impregnated with oysters either naturally, just by putting them in the environment, or offsite in setting tanks.
Our reef system can be efficiently installed and set up in a matter of minutes because all the pieces are very light, easy to transport, and maximize surface area in a way that’s not possible in other methods.
You mentioned that your oyster reef system is made out of stone and bamboo. Do you focus on incorporating biological material into your designs?
Oh, absolutely. Our number one priority is to be as environmentally positive as possible. We can’t generate a positive impact if we’re polluting at the same time. So, we are using bamboo spacers, and if that proves to not be durable enough, then we’ll just pivot to stainless steel spaces. We use stainless steel for all of our central core designs; the coil is made of stainless steel as well as the central beam that supports the plates. Stainless steel is environmentally inert: since it doesn’t oxidize, it doesn’t leach into the environment at all.
How did you develop this reef design?
Really, it just takes inspiration from how natural systems have developed over millennia. Natural marsh grasses absorb wave energy and cause sedimentation by having very flexible fins and a lot of surface area. Our marsh devices are essentially the exact same thing. Instead of all of the fins coming up perpendicular to the water, it’s easier for humans to make the fins go side to side from a central core. And coils replicate a root network; they’re extremely common and a tried-and-true method of rooting an object into a substrate. It’s basically just taking the design that nature’s already developed and utilizing it in a way that is easiest and most effective for humans to produce.
How do you ensure that your oyster reef system is not accidentally detrimental to other species?
Our oyster reef system would be an overall benefit to every aspect of the ecosystem. It provides hard structural complexity that fish and shrimp species use for nurseries, where a lot of very small organisms try to hide and survive. If you create this structural complexity for them, it helps all these baby fish stay alive. It creates a habitat for all of the other species as well.
Even that is secondary to the benefits that the oysters themselves provide. Oysters are known as ecosystem engineers; they provide a whole range of benefits to an ecosystem. If there weren’t oysters present in the New York area at all, then we would see algal blooms killing vast swaths of fish. We would see eelgrass beds suffocating due to the water being so opaque, so full of algae and other toxins, that sunlight can’t get down far enough for the grasses to photosynthesize. That would cause cascades of negative impact. Oysters are absolutely crucial to this entire system; anything we can do to make oyster reefs easier to install and more effective will have wide-ranging positive impacts to the environment.
Could you tell us about some of your other design ideas?
We have a plethora of different ideas now. The most fundamental design can be easily deviated to fill different needs. If you wanted to build dunes, you could simply make the fins wider and shorter because windblown sediment only really occupies a couple of inches above the beach and above land. You could even attach other rooting devices to unstable cliffs.
This was our second project at Sand Point Preserve in Long Island, and they had been suffering from very severe erosion of their sand cliffs. We have an engineering structure that can stabilize the cliff itself, and on top of that, in line with the living shoreline philosophies of helping to promote the growth of native species, we plant native plant species within the lattice of cubbies that give them a sheltered, stable environment to grow, to put down root systems, and to expand on either side in order to further stabilize the cliff. So, we are stabilizing the plants and the plants are stabilizing the cliff and all of them work to reinforce each other. The system grows over time to continually reinforce itself.
I read that the design is pretty easy to remove if you need to.
Thank you for bringing up that point, because that is one of the most important qualities of our technology. In this Pontchartrain project, for example, we were replacing sand fencing, which is basically massive wooden planks installed into the sediment. Not only does the fence restrict native species from passing from one side to the other, but it is also very labor intensive and disruptive to install in the first place.
First, they need to dig a very deep pit in the ground, then put the wooden planks in, and then fill those holes so that the wood is stable. Now in Louisiana, the sediment is full of sequestered toxins. There’s been petroleum plants in Louisiana for decades, and every year there is an oil spill of some kind. All of toxins in the water column eventually settle into the sediment layers. When you try to install sand fences, you are disrupting all of those sequestered toxins, the sediment column, and the various worms and organisms that live in the sediment. Additionally, you cannot remove them easily. Once you put them in, they’re basically permanent structures that would be labor intensive and time consuming to remove.
Meanwhile, our technologies are extremely versatile. For example, in Pontchartrain, they can be installed and left there for however long it takes the native grasses to establish, then after those grasses have established, the devices can be removed and installed in another area. They really are a long-term investment in that way.
The coil is extremely non-disruptive in its installation and its removal. So, I gave you example of the sand fencing and all the labor and disruption required for that. These coils can be installed in a matter of seconds, with one single handheld device, a power screwdriver, operated by one single person. Once the coil is driven into the sediment, it’s completely solid and stable. The only disruption to the sediment column is the pathway of the coil itself, which is less than an inch in diameter anyway. Then, if you want to remove the coil, it’s the same thing in reverse. The coil just follows its own pathway out of the sediment and leaves the sediment column and whatever sequestered pollutants or toxins completely undisturbed. It’s a huge innovation and much more efficient and volunteer-friendly than other methods.
A lot of environmental NGOs (non-governmental organizations) rely on volunteer labor to conduct large-scale projects, so volunteer friendliness is something that has to be very deeply considered. You can’t expect volunteers to lug massive chunks of concrete. You can’t expect volunteers to operate heavy machinery. But people who’ve never done anything in the environment before will have no trouble installing and uninstalling our devices. You can expect NGOs to be able to successfully use them with little to no training at all.
Could you tell us more about a project you’re really excited about?
The artificial oyster reef is one of our top priorities right now, so we have several groups that are very interested in testing them out. We would certainly be extremely interested in having some quantitative data regarding these oyster devices.
Additionally, the cliff stabilization is a very important tool and there’s a lot of people, especially in New York, that have anxiety relating to coastal erosion of sand cliffs. So, Long Island is a barrier island formed as massive sheets of ice pushed a lot of unsorted sediment into the Atlantic Ocean and then retreated. There’s whole communities and towns and buildings that are built on these unstable, unsorted sediments. When that sediment arrives at the coastline, you get these sand cliffs, and as sea level rises and storms get more intense, you see a lot of increased erosion of these sand cliffs. So, we’re currently working towards projects involving cliff stabilization and native plant establishment onto these cliffs. Vegetating the cliffs is the only consistent and ecologically positive way of stabilizing them; the root systems of plants are unmatched in their ability to stabilize and hold onto sediments.
American dune grass is the species that we used in the pilot project. They send out roots 15-plus feet in every direction; they’re specifically adapted to grab onto individual sediment particles and form rebar-like systems of structural support into sediment. That’s really what we’re relying on in order to stabilize these cliffs. And, of course, we can use this opportunity to establish plants that would provide other ecosystem benefits, like pollinator flowers. Additionally, plants that have high evapotranspiration qualities would absorb a lot of the water from rainstorms and evaporate it into the atmosphere, alleviating the cliff of water erosion.
I can think of a lot of communities that would really benefit from this type of technology, like Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay, which is threatened by soil erosion and sea level rise.
Absolutely. I think that you can draw a lot of similarities between the islands in the Chesapeake Bay and the various islands and communities in coastal Louisiana. So, there’s a lot of Indigenous groups that live and fish for shrimp and crawfish out in the very far reaches of the Mississippi Delta. They’re extremely unique in their social organizations and their cultural practices, and so it’s a huge priority of ours to help the communities that are dealing with these problems head-on, in any way we can.
One of the benefits our technology has over other solutions for coastal restoration is that the money a community spends on our technology gets cycled back into their economy much more effectively than with other means. For instance, we are working on a project with a community in southern Louisiana right now, and the people who install our devices are actual local community members. So, the work that is involved in the upkeep and installation of devices goes back into the circular economy. If they were to use a dredging company to artificially create new land by digging up sand from a faraway area and dumping it onto the beach, none of the money that the community spends on that project gets cycled back into the community. In addition, sediment nourishment—dumping new sediment onto the beach—has a plethora of ecological consequences. You’re basically burying the species that were previously inhabiting that area of beach. So, having massive corporations do these projects is not ideal.
This page of the catalog shows how a flatter area of coastal marsh can not only be remediated, but also built through time using an array of the MarshGuard devices. If Tangier Island is similar to the Mississippi Delta in that there’s not a lot of elevation throughout the island, MarshGuard devices can be used in addition to planting projects in order to naturally build back land where it had previously been eroding. I would be extremely honored to work with struggling communities and help build back land that’s being lost right now.
It’s also cool to think about how this technology can be used for multiple purposes that aren’t even related to marshes.
Yeah. It’s funny because when we meet with various NGOs and coastal administrators who are in charge of engaging in these projects, we explain the technology and its potential to them, and it always gets their minds racing. They start saying, “Oh, what if you do this? What if you line levies with a cliff stabilizer?” Or “What if you use them in this scenario?” It really gets a spark clicked with a lot of people, and I’m very motivated and inspired to hear the ideas that other people come up with. I think that there’s oceans of potential still out there to be discovered.
How do we get other young people interested in and more knowledgeable about these kinds of technologies?
So, I started being interested in the environment by volunteering for Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. There’s a lot of volunteer opportunities for local community members to participate in, and I think that it’s up to the municipalities that are engaging in these projects to encourage people to participate. Because for decades now, there’s been a huge lack of funding for environmental issues and environmental restoration; only in the past couple of years has the funding started to increase exponentially as the federal government realized that we have to act as soon as we can in order to combat these problems. Thankfully, there’s finally a little bit of money entering this system and making it more possible for people to actually engage in environmental restoration in a sustainable way.
There’s a lot of work to be done to get education of these issues in the public eye, but I think that we’re heading in the right direction, and we just need to be more motivated. I think that in the next few years, we’ll see a lot more jobs open up in environmental restoration and more ability for people to join in these projects.
If I were to give advice to people who are looking to get involved: volunteer for your state parks. I volunteer every summer and have a really fun time doing it. Two summers ago, I was volunteering for Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, and my job was catching terrapin turtles, tagging them, and recording statistics for what their populations look like. You meet a lot of really fascinating and inspired people when you volunteer, no matter where you live. It’s just a matter of finding those people, joining community, and helping to kickstart the movement.
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