Exiting from extraction

Mine rehab no longer needs to take place once a mine has closed but is built into each stage of a mine’s lifetime, putting into the earth what natural ecosystems will one day get out. North Australian SeaCulture (NASC) has built its business turning the biomass leftover from seaweed extraction, once treated as waste, into a soil-health product sold directly into mine-site rehabilitation. 

The process itself was redesigned to make this possible, avoiding harsh alkaline treatment, additives that would compromise the return of natural ecosystems. NASC now has two saleable products instead of one saleable product and one disposal cost, connecting what grows in the sea with what can grow on earth.

One of mining's biggest reputational and regulatory liabilities is about what happens after the mining has been completed. Degraded land at close-out doesn't respond well to synthetic treatment at scale and trucking material into remote sites is often uneconomic and carbon intensive. Nature tech supply chain solves a problem that conventional inputs can't reach.

This is also a live industry interest rather than a hypothetical one. BHP, Rio Tinto, South32 and IGO all sit within our accelerator's partner network, evidence that the exit from extraction is something the industry is actively financing.

Living, reciprocal infrastructure

Ports and jetties have been engineered purely to hold weight and absorb impact but Ocean Hex is building the case that this is a wasted opportunity. Its HIVE system turns coastal infrastructure into a living, regenerative asset, engineering the same jetties and breakwaters that ships move past into structures that also support marine life.

Ocean Hex is the clearest expression of the loop. Infrastructure can be designed to actively support the environment it’s built into, and in doing so, support the communities whose livelihoods depend on that ecosystem staying healthy. 

Living substitutes

Nature tech's role in chemicals and materials is to offer industry functioning substitutes.

Often age-old processes for developing materials have been built out of habit and general success, but that doesn’t mean those are the only processes available.  

Uluu's seaweed-based polymer, used in Ocean Hex's SNAPHEX system to replace plastic cable ties in coral reef restoration, is a bio-based material directly standing in for a petrochemical one, in a genuine industrial application, not a marketing exercise sitting alongside the real product.

NASC's own process uses zero chemical additives or harsh alkaline treatment and the extraction works just as well. 

Sensing what's at stake

Insurers and regulators are beginning to price ecological risk into how they underwrite and approve critical assets which means the industries building and protecting that infrastructure need better data. 

Pyri's wildfire detection system protects built assets before loss occurs, giving operators the ability to prove resilience and meet compliance before either is tested by an actual fire. Ocean Hex's regulator tender for coastal ecosystem monitoring does the equivalent job for port authorities and coastal developers, supplying the ongoing environmental data that approvals increasingly depend on.

In both cases, nature tech operates as the sensing system underneath infrastructure, telling an operator what's actually happening to the ground, water or air their asset depends on, in time to act on it.

Yield at the source

Snailcam maps snail hotspots across broadacre farms and has cut bait use by up to 70%, protecting grain yield and keeping crop clean at receival. It's a tight example of what nature tech does best in agriculture: reducing chemical input reliance from inside a critical export industry, rather than sitting beside it as an add-on practice a grower can choose to skip.

Community as ecosystem

Nature/venture reciprocity can’t exist without the engagement of local communities. Mining, shipping and construction all operate in landscapes and waters that belong to the communities who live there first. Tidal Moon's Aboriginal-led marine research and NASC's community-ownership model throughout North Australia and parts of South East Asia both start with the buy-in of local communities. Ecological restoration and genuine community ownership are what earns the industry's licence to operate at all.

The mine, the port, the polymer, the sensor, the field, all often work in tandem because someone worked with nature's needs to shape their infrastructure instead of asking nature to absorb whatever infrastructure demanded of it first.