 I'm so excited about this, I see this as a huge thing. I'm Jay Fidel, this is Think Tech and we're going to talk about, what are we talking about science, we're talking about climate change, we're talking about global connections with Shemret Herkel Finkel, who is an Israeli living in Tel Aviv who gets around. She comes here, joins us in the studio. Thank you for coming down. Thank you for having me here. Shemret, you know one thing I want to say about Israelis, I think Israelis do a lot of science in Israel and they stay in Israel and send out their work. That's not the case with you. You are global. Your vision is global and you are global. You move around. You move around from port to port, from waterfront to waterfront spreading your concrete happiness. It's all about concrete. E-concrete which is really more than it sounds to be. Tell us what E-concrete is and you're a visionary in terms of climate change and science. You are a science and marine biologist. You're a business lady and what was the other thing I found on your philosopher. You got to be all those things to do what you do. So concrete, it sounds so heavy. What is E-concrete? E-concrete is, I want to say lighter but it's not lighter. It's a more environmentally compatible concrete that allows for oysters, corals, algae and thriving habitats to actually grow on our coastlines. At the moment when we build coastal protections, they don't get a lot of life because of different aspects of the material, of the design. These engineered solutions don't think about marine life when they're being constructed and we want to change that. We really want to revolutionize the industry and have people think about the marine ecology, biodiversity and the marine environment resilience, adaptivity to climate change through an ecological design of our breakwaters. E-concrete provides a new product that really tweaks the concrete composition very slightly to allow for marine biology to thrive in a very rich way. And we also do a variety of textures and designs. So if you have a certain fish that needs a shelter in a certain diameter hole, we will add that into the design without compromising any of the strength. So you have three essential characteristics of these pieces of concrete. We'll look at the small ones in a minute. But they're big, they're in harbors, they're in waterfronts where people congregate and industry congregates on a waterway, usually in the ocean waterway. So what is, this is like a Passover thing, what is this concrete different from all other concretes? That's right. So regular concretes have a very aggressive chemical component into them and they do not allow for the delicate larvae, the babies of the organisms to metamorphosis and actually thrive on the wall. You want to invite sea life into the material? We want to invite sea life in a very rich and diverse, not only the opportunistic species, like the weedy species that will come anyway and create environmental problems. We want to get the refill communities, the local species that we want that bring productivity to grow directly on these heavy duty concrete infrastructure. And they do. How do you achieve that? We achieve that through a very specific admix that we introduce into the concrete. Can you tell me about it? I know it's patented, right? The technology is patented. The material itself is almost like 100% recycled or byproducts of different industries so we didn't invent any new powder. We took stuff from the industry that nobody's been using and we tested it in a very intensive series of tests and the process that's patented then. It's the process that's patented. That's correct. Three characteristics. One is the material itself that you bring in you process in that way. Two is the surface design. It's the surface texture. We need roughness. Organisms like roughness to attach, to adhere to the substrate. And then the three-dimensional design. That's what I mentioned about holes, crevices, water retaining features. Things that actually make habitat value for those organisms. Okay, why don't you show us what you have. You have models. These are not the originals you guys. These are like 100s or 1000s of real dimensions. This is in scale of 1 to 20 and the big one is like a meter and a half size. This is an armor unit that can be used to protect the coastlines to create breakwaters, revampments while creating habitat value. It can go standalone just cubes, cubes, cubes. The designs can vary according to the needs of the engineers. And we have this one of my favorites. This is a rock pool simulation. So if you've ever been to beautiful rock pools where all the sea anemones and the sea stars thrive you don't get that on a coastal structure typically that is made of concrete. It looks friendly. It's a little jacuzzi for marine life and this jacuzzi is strong enough to tolerate even a 100-year storm and you can integrate that with rock armor. So when you're building a coastline you don't just get the risk reduction. You also get ecological elements to thrive. What's the armor thing? Armor is basically to harden our coastline in face of sea level rise and climate action with respect to... Oh, so these, you put a certain number of them in a certain place, a certain cognitive, a certain texture and design in a certain place and they... They break waves. They slow the water when you have like an event of sea level rising in, you know, in super storms. You can achieve different results with different designs and shapes. So the engineers help us here. We don't do this alone. We work in synergy with engineers, with the landscape designers, with the policy makers. We need everybody on board to get these projects in the water. Who puts them in the water? Do you put them in the water? I mean, not you yourself. The company is a concrete tech, a limited, which is an Israeli company? We actually have a New York subsidiary, Deconcrete Inc. might be easier for you. Okay, well, all the same. But the idea is that we work with local first of all local manufacturers. So we don't ship these from Israel. The big ones. I only ship the small ones from Israel. Shipping is expensive. Yeah. And it has a carbon footprint. So we use local manufacturers. We basically give them the salt and pepper for the concrete that I mentioned and the mold system. And then they do the casting locally with a local precast manufacturer and a local constructor company is going to do the construction. We hire a local construction company to actually lay it down in the harbour. To lay it down in the way it should be done. How do you supervise? Our company supervises the installation. We have a plan for what goes where. Yeah, we work with engineers on the plan and we want to have it perfect because if you put it too high it will be too dry and we want to get the biology maximized. Also there's an element of connectivity between these guys. So if you want the fish to be able to kind of pop around, you want to have the location of the units optimized. Further to the whole notion of global thinking which I really enjoy. I think it's so important. I mean really that's to me, I'm so impressed by that. That you come out. You're everywhere. Give us the ports that you're already involved in. Well, we're working with the Port of Rotterdam in Holland. We're working with Port of Jaffa in Tel Aviv. It's a small port. We're working with two Spanish ports at the moment. The Port of Vigo and Port of Malia that are committed to work together towards greener, more environmentally sensitive ports. Port of San Diego where I hope next month we're going to sign for an agreement, knock on wood, to do a new design of a tide pool armor and to pilot it within the port. Which other ports? We work with the Port of New York, New Jersey at the time but no actual installation. And the Port of Savannah, Georgia was actually one of the first ones to give a trial to our elements. This you can save cities. Yes, we can definitely, well we save cities. We save our oceans and it's a real win-win solution from that perspective that you get the risk reduction that unfortunately is necessary and you get the ecosystem services. I have to say if you were able to evacuate people, let them retreat, go one mile back and let the oceans do their thing, that would have been the best solution. Management retreat, management alignment, living shorelines, that's optimal but unfortunately there are restrictions that people like to live by the oceans and there are services we have to take from our ports and our waterfronts, our working waterfronts, so we come in at that intersection where you have to go gray and hard protection and we give a better solution. You can save lower Manhattan, huh? Well, I hope I'll get involved in that as well. There's a couple of projects coming up there and I hope they'll consider our technology. So one other thing is that I saw in your materials that you had a solid phase and now you're moving to the next phase which is the big time installation phase. Describe that for me, will you? Yeah, so we are quite a young company. We were established in 2012 and until now it's been kind of a long process to validate the technology so we had to wait for life to grow when the concrete takes years and we published scientific papers on that and then we started putting demonstrations of the full product in small numbers and again, knock on wood, hoping in the end of this year we'll be able to start doing the first large scale installation in a project in New York. Could you help us here in Raikiki? We're losing our beaches, yeah? So I just came back from a community meeting about the watershed here and there is a lot of concern from the local communities about, you know, armoring and putting sea walls that obviously damaged the pristine, beautiful Hawaii coastline. It's my first time here so I'm still amazed. Definitely we can bring life to those armoring units and those elements and work with engineers of the city of the Army Corps to come up with more resilient designs that are also more aesthetic and bring more life to those coastlines. It's funny there was a, on the show here sitting in that chair, Alfred He, engineer, local engineer he builds concrete structures, not as sophisticated, not as biologically sound as yours, but he does build concrete structures and he came up with a way to save the Natatorium which is that World War I pool there in Raikiki and to control the water flow. That was his thing, controlling the water flow in and out. I'm not sure he's around doing it anymore but maybe that's another opportunity for you. And finally, I heard yesterday on PBS on the news hour that the state of Louisiana loses an amount of land equal to one football field every single day. It's losing its shore in rapid, rapid speed. Is this something that your technology could help? Definitely and I know that they've just put a budget of like, I don't know, 300 million dollars for the next year for projects so we're going to try and tap onto that because we can do scar protection and we can do kind of an element of a hybrid between living shorelines and hardened shorelines to get, let's say, oysters back and marsh beds back but still stabilize the soil and help prevent some of that erosion, definitely. The beauty is that with this technology you get the life to grow on the concrete much more efficiently so it grows like a natural system. They like to be at the same elevation from the water line so basically when the sea level rises, these guys grow and adapt and that doesn't happen in a gray concrete and that's what we call it living structure. Getting any resistance, any skepticism about the product and the technology? Well of course, I mean we have to talk to different stakeholders, engineers and procurement departments and it's very strange for them to think about this concept. But they haven't thought about it before? They haven't thought about it. A lot of engineers actually look at marine life as a nuisance, as a problem and we are really changing the paradigm and I can tell you in 2012, 2013, there was a lot of interest especially on the east coast but there was still a pushback and I can tell you now they're just thirsty for solutions. They're asking for it. They don't know what they're asking for and then we come and we tell them, hey, this is what you need and they're like this is beautiful. What about competition? I mean somebody can watch this show and hear what you have to say and feel, you know, equally motivated because of climate change and all that and go try to copy you. Is anybody doing that now? There are companies or institutions, there's a lot of academia that work on different aspects of the concrete textures and designs typically there will be like panels that you would attach to an existing structure which is, it's nice because it brings out the idea and the concept from an engineering perspective, engineers don't like to attach stuff to their concrete. They don't like to drill into it and to attach stuff. So at the moment there is no direct competition with somebody actually giving an equivalent type of product that is the full-on structure that brings ecology. I would welcome competition. I would like to make as much impact as possible so if I can't take on the world which I'm trying and I might take a portion of it, if there are other solutions that are really solid that would be welcome. In any case they will have to wait and prove their technology. I mean we publish scientific papers on our results. Every installation that we've done we've had like a control treatment kind of array and we did it for two years and we published results in peer-review papers, magazines so that people can see that there is solid science behind this. You know Shimon, I really think you're saving the world. But you know, we'll see what happens. One log at a time. Thank you. At least one component I'm helping. So you know usually we take a break around this time in the show but we're going to take an unusual interesting break. We're going to play some movies in the break. Alright. So can you describe to our audience what movies we're going to play? An animated movie that we've prepared. Because the technology is a bit complex or difficult to comprehend, we've prepared an animated movie to show how we bring the concrete to life and what types of products we have, what types of productions we can have because we can produce in different techniques. The idea is to get a seamless solution to the industry. So that's going to be the first video. And I think the second video is going to be about an award that I recently won from the EU Commissioner for Science and Innovation for one of three most innovative women in science in the EU. Alright great. So this is our break today. We're going to have two movies for a break. So get your popcorn out and watch these two short movies. E-concrete brings urban and coastal concrete infrastructures to life using proprietary bio-enhanced concrete. Two thirds of the world population concentrated around coastlines exposed to ever increasing extreme weather events and rising sea levels. Accelerated coastal development is inevitable creating tremendous pressure on marine ecosystems. 70% of coastal infrastructure is concrete based. Our science based concrete compositions, textures and designs enhance the biological performance and ecological value of concrete structures while increasing their durability and lifespan. E-concrete provides services from A to Z. From site analysis, concepts and design, through product supply, to project monitoring. Our technologies can be applied as ready to use precast products or by using our unique forms alongside our bio-enhancing admixtures. The company's line of precast products currently includes ecological armoring units, enhanced sea walls, designed tide pools, and articulated concrete marine mattresses. Our forms, liners and admixtures can be used for on-site casting of new elements or for retrofitting structures like pure piles. These can also be used by licensed partners at their home facility. All our products are tailored to encourage growth of diverse plants and animals such as oysters and corals which build calcitic skeletons on the concrete. In a process called bioprotection, this calcitic layer encases the concrete, contributing to the strength and stability of the structure. Our patented bio-enhancing admixtures have been fully tested in a variety of marine ecosystems across the globe, yielding excellent results. We have succeeded in creating a win-win solution for both thriving ecosystems and high-performance concrete structures. The scientists and professionals at e-concrete are proud to be at the forefront of the next generation of ecological engineers and we invite you to join us. Coastal cities across the globe are experiencing substantial stresses from global climate change impacts like sea level rise and increased storminess. Cities are looking for adaptive solutions that will create a more resilient coastline. e-concrete is all about that. Through our innovative concrete composition, surface textures and three-dimensional designs we allow for concrete to become full of life, a thriving ecosystem that protects our coastline. I told you this was phenomenal. Really. Think Tech Talks. It's all about this kind of technology, global technology. So can you summarize those movies for us? What do they mean to you? First of all it's a creation that we've done for the first time. We've actually had videos produced and I'm very happy about the product and I hope it makes it more accessible because for me as a scientist it's sometimes difficult to explain the technology in a non-techy, non-HD type of way and regarding the Women Innovators Award I'm so proud I'm so proud for my personal achievement. I'm proud of e-concrete for bringing this forward and I'm so happy that Ecology won because typically it will be Biomed which is very, very, very important to have like innovation in medicine and in fields of anti-cancer but it's also very important for climate change to win attention. Yeah, it's a huge psychic benefit in innovating things and discovering things and solving problems and moving ahead and benefiting the species so to speak. But why do you do this? Why did you decide to do it? Why are you doing it now? Why are you putting the time and effort in? So I was fortunate enough to do a lot of diving and snorkeling and ever since I was a little girl I was going to the beach and studying these communities. I've also seen a lot of devastation and I've seen a lot of non-productive environments, a lot of concrete. Myself and my co-founder Dr. Ido Sela who started as my student we worked together in Africa, we worked together in Israel and we saw a lot of barren concrete and we decided we have to do something about it and it was one occasion that we saw a place where the sea wall kind of shifted from gray to full of life and we asked what's the difference and we don't know it's the same contractor, something must have changed so we started looking into a solution and my goal is to really change the way the industry works so that they don't build flat and featureless and only engineered solutions that they also take into consideration of the environment and not consider a port or a waterfront as a sacrificed area from an ecological perspective. For me it's an old brainer and that's my passion, that's what I'm doing it and that's why I hope that the company will succeed in changing the wheels of this very conservative industry. Yeah, why am I reminded of the whole thing about making the desert bloom, taking an environment that is really not friendly, not productive and then making that desert bloom. The Israeli mantra you know. That's amazing, I never thought of it that way but yeah we're taking the concrete deserts and we're making them bloom, that's a great thank you. So what do you got here, what are these things we have to finish talking about? I need to swap my concrete around, so these are miniatures of different products this is for example a marine mattress that will be used for covering oil and gas pipelines so even for the most polluting companies we can do some more habitat value or protection from scour for eroding coastlines which could be relevant for Hawaii. I already mentioned the tide poles and the armor, this is heavy duty cable in the small miniature one it's steel but in the actual unit which is a lot bigger, it's heavy duty cable from non-metal material. It's not going to corrode? No, it's not going to corrode. Seawalls, so this is really what a regular seawall in the marina or in the waterfront would look like featureless, flat, no shelter, no hiding places and our units apart from the material of course which is essential, we are designing with nature to allow for water to retain, for shelter to happen we can add holes to the designs, I'm always finding our designers to add more and more complexity, we can negotiate between biological requirements that we try to highlight and the ability to do something that's very much applied in an industrial level, so these are a few of our products, we have a couple more and we're constantly designing new solutions, so that's the part we love most is to come to a project and say, hey we have a problem now, we need to drain the water from the mountains and we need to slow them down before they go into the ocean, so can we do a step terrace that's also growing some life on it, so that's where we have most fun. A couple of points of free association, that seabed mattress, it looks like a Japanese roof, those special Japanese shingles, so an artist who paints that, so there's an aesthetic here, and to go further there's an aesthetic on this seawall, but this is a scientifically designed aesthetic to attract biological life and all, I think that the biology and the aesthetics come together because natural systems are obviously very aesthetic and we are trying to mimic features of natural habitats, this precast unit won the global biomimicry design challenge this September, so we're getting appreciated for building a full on habitat in a precast unit that you can come with a crane and just install it and it will create a laguna, like a sheltered niche and the designs are usually meant to have a lot of edge effect, to have a lot of different elevations and different niches and I have to thank my team in Econcrete for amazing designs, so we have a great design team, yeah. And this, I say to myself, gee that's very aesthetic, it's scientific, but the aesthetic is even greater because it's scientific, so I see myself, just personal, wearing a t-shirt okay, with this design on it, don't lose that thought, I'd buy the t-shirt actually Shimrit. I have a concept which I haven't implemented yet, you take these little guys on the necklace, so I see where you're going with it. Well let's look at some photographs, we can see the processes of how this works, why don't you describe the photographs. So this is an armor unit so this is one of these cubes after it's been in the water for about two years. You don't see the concrete anymore, you only see a cover of marine life you can see in a beautiful nudibranch, I have to tell you it's a secret, it's an invasive species in the Mediterranean, but it's still a beautiful nudibranch that escaped from the sea into the ocean of the Mediterranean. This is actually the same block when it's being deployed so here we're putting it in Marina Herzliya near Tel Aviv this is again you can see kind of the before after, our goal is to really merge into the natural environment and create a phasing between concrete and reef. Is there rebar in the concrete? There is, in the seawall there is rebar, these guys don't have rebar so this is the tide pool, one side is Brooklyn Bridge Park and the other side is Mediterranean Sea, so you see what happens after a while and you see that there is difference in the different ecosystems. So the same product can function in different seas, in tropical or in temperate seas and you can get different results. This is a very interesting project we've done in Brooklyn Bridge Park this is Pile Encapsulation, all the piers, you know pier 55, pier 6 all of the piers are standing on wooden piles that are eroding and we've created an encapsulation from concrete that is thriving it's full of sponges and tunicates and actually we got oyster to recruit on them which is amazing. We have one product that is terrestrial, it's our solution for green walls so we don't want to put the vertical soil system with a lot of maintenance and water we just made a concrete facade to grow lichens, mosses and climbing vegetation and this is actually in Jerusalem, this is a governmental building with our technology. It's very aesthetic, I wouldn't mind having it in my house. Tell me where you live. This is our title in Brooklyn again I think over there, it's very important to say that it's also a public education component when we put the pools in the park, now they have ecological tours to come and learn about urban nature, you can touch it, you can go next to it and you don't just see the water, you can actually feel and see what's going on. This is the marine mattress, this has been in Fort Lauderdale with the Navy and Nova University it's been in the water for two years now and it's showing excellent results again you can see the water retained in the low tide which is very unique, you can have fish and snails in different marine life to grow on it. So you can grow marine life quicker with this? Much quicker, significantly quicker so within six months we can see a difference, this is like a seawall, this is after just over a year you can see the fish hiding, it seems trivial but it doesn't happen, if it didn't have that small ledge which is only a few inches it wouldn't have where to hide and these are called resident fish, they live there they don't just trespass. Like affordable housing, yeah. I think again the tide pool is starting because we've had installations in many different locations, this is in the Port of Rotterdam, actually we should have switched the order, this is after one year in the water, all this brown algae is a habitat forming algae, it's very important, there's shrimp and crab inside of it, this is just like four weeks after we installed it, the same location more or less. It's amazing for me that we're able to work with the Port of Rotterdam and to come to a country like Holland that is like, they're the geniuses in coastal production and we're able to bring them some value, so I'm very happy. That's fantastic, I mean I identified four or five different designs, we have something on the table, so I would say that there must be other designs in the pipeline, no? You must be working on other things, can you talk about it? Yeah, for sure, so now for example we're developing a new product with the Port of San Diego, kind of an interlocking unit that will create armor defense for the world, strong and interlocking, so you can put one next to the other and it's like Lego so it's a very nice design and we have installations that we're going to do for some of the offshore, there's a lot of offshore wind and also some of the scar protection for the wind turbines for the offshore, we're designing new stuff that will create like an oyster habitat and provide the protection from scour and we have a million other ideas Okay, well I know they'll be realized and I know we'll see more and hear more about you and I know you will do your part to save the world and this is a really good sort of object lesson on how you can wake up one morning and have an idea and use your skills and actually participate in saving the world, we need that. Thank you, thank you Thank you very much, thank you