Entrepreneur Ted Martin was on an elk hunting trip in Montana three years ago when he met an inventor with a product called a “floating island.” Far from the French meringue dessert, this floating island was intended to remove pollutants and rebalance bodies of water struggling with urban runoff.
It was comprised of a steel wool-like material called Matrix produced from recycled plastic drinking bottles and was intended to mimic natural bogs and wetlands. When combined with inert, buoyant marine foam and seeded with indigenous wetlands plants, the mock island provided a home for tiny microbes capable of gobbling up the overabundance of unwelcome nutrients.
Martin learned the product, BioHaven Floating Islands, was being used to a limited degree throughout the world not just to ameliorate water quality, but also to improve aesthetics and to aid in bank stabilization.
“I was fascinated,” he says. “I saw the product and thought about wetlands. We’ve seen so much of the marsh lost over the years.”
Martin believed the market potential was vast and untapped, and he decided to invest. Martin, his wife and five adult children formed Floating Island Environmental Solutions in August 2008 and became the country’s first licensed provider to manufacture and sell BioHaven Floating Islands of 25 square feet or more. Their territory includes Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and Georgia.
Business took off quickly. Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo requested an installation earlier this year to clean up its swan pond. Martin expects to begin a project soon at Grand Lake in Oklahoma, in which 24,000 square feet of floating islands will be used to improve water quality. In November 2008, the Naples (Fla.) Natural Resources Division hired FIES to launch a 160-square-foot island to help clean up a municipal pond. The company also sent an installation to the Po River in Italy, where a documentary film crew needed to recreate an island prior to a shoot.
Martin felt the need to step back and learn everything he could about how to prescribe the product—including size, placement, plant life and long-term care—in order to maximize the effect for each customer.
“It’s not that easy without really studying it,” Martin says. “We wanted to know more.”
So did the research community, which felt the product showed promise. According to research gathered by NESCO, a Texas-based company hired by FIES, floating islands have been successfully used throughout the world, although conclusive data remains a few years off. The best known body of work has been conducted by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, which posits the systems are promising solutions to storm-water treatment, says NESCO geoscientist Craig Kissock, the technical expert on the project.
“What this technology does is to combine all three existing technologies—bioremediation, phytoremediation and hydroponics,” Kissock says. “It has huge potential.”
As plants grow in on top of the island, their exposed dangling root systems below act as “hanging filters,” he says, which provide more surface area than even natural wetlands. The more surface area present, the more room microbes have to live and multiply.
Throughout its first year in business, FIES has teamed with a number of public research projects to study the product’s long-term impact. The company has also facilitated a strategic research team with some of the top wetlands researchers in the U.S. and New Zealand to measure results, Kissock says.
“The secret is that you need to have enough research done to create the design protocol,” he says. “We’ve laid out comprehensive research and R&D programs to get to that point.”
While the product itself is registered, the research projects FIES participates in are all public, a choice Martin made early on. FIES has put up matching funds and in-kind donations in grant applications.
Meanwhile, there has been no shortage of entities interested in testing the product to improve water quality and aid in bank stabilization.
The Lafourche Levee System at Golden Meadow installed 800-square-foot sections in March that were placed alongside the bank, and then seeded with the native wetland plants, Vermillion Smooth Cord, Marsh Hay and Seashore Paspalum. Within a month, the plant life had grown substantially, and the shoreline showed promise of filling in between the bank and the new floating island, Martin says.
Research also is under way to test 4,200 square feet of floating islands in the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge in New Orleans East, a joint project between New Orleans and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In August, research begins in a wastewater pond in Lafourche Parish to apply floating islands where water hyacinths have been used in the past. The disadvantage of water hyacinths, an invasive nonnative plant, is that they create impassable conditions unless constantly monitored, says Brian LeBlanc, associate professor at the LSU AgCenter’s Calligari Environmental Center.
LeBlanc and the AgCenter also have teamed with FIES to conduct research on the floating island’s effectiveness in cleaning up agricultural waste on an LSU dairy farm in Franklinton. Earlier this year, the AgCenter submitted a $250,000 grant to the Environmental Protection Agency to test the floating islands in University and City Park lakes.
LeBlanc believes the islands could abate the occasional algae blooms caused by the overabundance of nutrients that run off from residences and public recreational facilities. Nutrients in warm water cause a proliferation of algae, which later decomposes. As the algae breaks down, it consumes oxygen from the water and leads to fish kills, he says.
“I’m very convinced that it will work,” LeBlanc says. “The real question is how much of the islands to use and what plants to create the biggest impact.”
