Episode 13: Shimrit Perkol-Finkel - Concrete Action For Life Below Water
Tessa Wernink:
Welcome to Episode 13 of What If We Get It Right? I'm Tessa Wernink, a social entrepreneur, and I've teamed up with Impossible, home of planet centric design. Togethe we bring you stories about how to build businesses in a new direction.
Today, I speak with Shimrit Perkol Finkel, a Marine Biologist turned social impact entrepreneur. Shimrit is the CEO and co-founder of ECOncrete, a company that is creating solutions for man-made and coastal marine infrastructure through the use of bio enhanced concrete.
The team creates products that are more durable with a longer lifespan and they help marine ecosystems thrive.
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
So ECOncrete is a technology for building robust coastal structures that are fostering marine life. The core technology is a combination of three elements that work in synergy, the concrete composition, the surface roughness, and the three-dimensional design.
We basically slightly modified the concrete mix design or the recipe of the concrete, to counter some of the negative impacts of concrete on marine life and to allow for the concrete to invite growth of rich and diverse marine ecosystems. Basically it's a technology platform that can be implemented to any type of Marine, coastal concrete structure to get that triple bottom line of structural, ecological and community in one.
Tessa Wernink:
With over 20 years of experience in the field of Marine Biology and Ecology, Shimrit is using her expertise in sustainable management and ecological engineering to push businesses, governments, and project developers to start using environmentally sensitive designs for coastal areas.
ECOncrete is explicitly putting the planet and living seeds at the center of their business. Listen in as Shimrit shows us how we can tackle a huge ecological problems, such as concrete one step at a time and how exasperating it can be to push a solution that is so obvious the best choice.
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
Good morning, Tessa.
Tessa Wernink:
How are you this morning?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
Very well. Thank you. It's been the first rain here in Tel Aviv, after months of s mer.
Tessa Wernink:
First rain, but you're still look like it's summer there. It's a definitely turned winter. It's so nice to have you on my podcast. I've been doing a lot of research. Around your company, but also concrete in general.
So I'm really looking forward to hearing more from you about this topic. And I wanted to start by looking towards the future because as most social impact entrepreneurs start, they have a vision of what a future could look like. And I was wondering whether you could paint that picture for me.
What does the future look like when you see into it?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
My vision and basically the vision of concrete is coastlines that are strong, resilient and teaming with life. That means that we have a very good synergy between the communities that live at the coastline and the marine communities that inhabit those fragile ecosystems.
Basically looking into a future where any coastal construction, , is done, including principles of ecological engineering and ecological considerations that are embedded throughout the process of design and construction.
That's our vision basically.
Tessa Wernink:
And that vision, comes from also a love of the sea.
Where does it come from? Kind of why coastlines?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
Yes. So I'm very passionate about marine life and the marine environment. I'm a diver, I've been, you know, a frequent visitor to the coastline since I was a young kid. I always lived five minutes from the beach and my father took me to the Tel Aviv coast, every week, if not every day.
And I think it's very much inherent for me to be kind of in tune with the marine nature. And, unfortunately we've also seen quite a lot of damages to the marine environment that are mainly induced by us humans, including processes of coastal development and, growing cities and growing ports.
And that was kind of the driver for me and my co-founder, also a Marine biologist and we actually met in university, to innovate and to come up with a solution that can be adopted by industries across this kind of field. And bring that balance back to our coastlines.
Tessa Wernink:
I'm wondering as a Marine Biologist, you love the sea and then you're now into concrete, you know, how did that happen?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
It's exactly that point. I came from background of working in academia. I have I've done my first, second, third degree and a post-doc, all focused around designing, man-made structures to better mimic natural communities.
And I realized seeing the, magnitude of this industry of coastal and marine construction that in order to make a true change, we have to translate some of that knowledge into Applied Science that can be adopted easily and cost-effectively by the industry.
Otherwise, the, future will not look, according to our vision. We have to make it very much feasible and easy to adopt and that's really where we made myself and my co-founder made a joint decision to take this concept to commercial level and to establish a corporate. We didn't really envision where we were going to go with this.
From our perspective, we're going to be the leaders in the field, and set new norms for construction, which is where we want to be. But we definitely knew that we want to change the industry. And the first step for us was to go into commercial entity.
Tessa Wernink:
This whole field that you're working in, concrete.
Could you give some context for my listeners? Like what are the issues with concrete? Not just in like maybe coastal areas, but generally?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
Yeah. So at the moment it's amazing, but concrete is the second most consumed material in our planet, second only to water. It's really alarming. The concrete industry, well, it is striving to go greener. It is at the moment responsible for 7 to 8% of the entire humanity's carbon emissions.
And the problem is kind of twofold because in the process of generating the clinker or the cement, it's a very much energy intensive process where you have to use very high temperature to produce the clinker.
So you're kind of emitting CO2 at that level. And the chemical process of the formation of the cement also releases CO2.
So there's a lot of footprint of the concrete industry. And, because of, at the moment about 70% of all of the coastal and marine structures are concrete based and on land, of course, it's the number one choice for construction.
When you combine that with increased human population, especially along the coastline, about half of the human population is concentrating around the coastline. So we're seeing the magnitude of the problem. And then from, I will zoom in onto biological problem in the marine environment, the concrete is not just your standard, cement aggregating water, which is kind of the classic recipe for concrete. In the marine environment to make it in compliance with the standards and to make it strong enough to endure 30, 50, even a hundred years, it has a lot of additives. It has corrosion inhibitors, air entrainers, workability agents.
There's a soup of chemicals into marine concrete. And those kind of clash with marine life as, as there's many studies that show that concrete, even after 10, sometimes after 20 years still doesn't accommodate or doesn't act as a surrogate to a natural reef. So the chemical composition is one problem.
And also the way that we structured the concrete, we obviously the engineers specify smooth surfaces and repetitive elements, and those present very little heterogeneity and very little habitat value. And those are the problems we tackle with the concrete.
Tessa Wernink:
So when you see that future, like the coastal areas being, be re-enlivened and I guess, with the biodiversity, how do you know that you're getting there?
How are you going to measure that you're actually making an impact?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
I think that we can divide it into kind of two levels. At one level, we'll see that if we're very successful, there will be new norms and new codes for construction. So for example, we envision a new code for bio enhancing concrete that could be just specified for the marine environment. And then every project will have to have that. So that's kind of the highest level.
From an ecological perspective, it means that we will be able to measure. And that's what my company has been doing almost on any installation that we've done. Is to measure the biological indices and the environmental impact.
So for example, having more species, higher biodiversity, higher live cover, more filter feeders that can increase the water quality, having more calcifying organisms that on one hand we learned are making the concrete stronger. And on the other hand, they're also creating a carbon sink.
These are things that are very measurable and you can get those measurements across different ecosystems, and we'll be able to basically have a network of information in the future of how much ecosystem services we're gaining from those kilometers and kilometers of structures, as opposed to what we had until today, which is basically the opposite,
that were the negative impacts of these structures on the ecosystems?
Tessa Wernink:
And what was that like for you? Like when was the first time you started, like understanding that the product that you were making was actually doing what it was supposed to do, like you were making that impact.
Can you remember that moment?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
Yeah, I think that first of all, when we started developing or did the heavy duty R&D process, we had about 20 different concrete mix designs and we've deployed them in the Mediterranean, kind of our home base. And I think as, as little as 6 months later, we saw a really clear signal of some of those concrete mix designs.
And we really saw with the naked eye that it was much more alive than a regular concrete, which was used as a comparison. And I think that's also when we kind of said the term ‘Bringing Concrete to Life’ because it really just, it showed, and then I think it was after Superstorm Sandy hit in the US.
That's where also we started hearing people talk about resiliency in our coastline and resilient infrastructure and that immediately connected with what we're trying to do because a natural ecosystem, well is much more resilient. And the bio diverse ecosystem is more resilient to change than a low diverse ecosystem.
And these were kind of the core principles for us. So once it started to tap into the language, at the policy level. That's where we started feeling that we're at the right place at the right time.
Tessa Wernink:
So what I hear you saying is that your impact is both like on your product level, like really being able to see that.
But also on a more macro level of like looking at standards and policy, it sounds like that's really necessary as well because the amount of kilometers of coastline is huge.
And, and I read something about concrete. It's amazing materials to build with. But you can't actually get rid of it or reuse it. Right, you can just take it down to a rebel.
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
Yeah, I mean, they are looking at circular economy with concrete and it is possible to break it down and to use ground concrete. But the application is very limited. I don't think the standards for either terrestrial and definitely not marine allows for the use of recycled concrete.
So at the moment, you can't really have full secularity. You might be able to get some work with recycled sand and aggregate. But our vision is a bit different as I mentioned. So we wouldn't want to have that broken down. We want that concrete to last and last and last, and be a part of the ecosystem and be a diverse ecosystem that would give back to nature.
Tessa Wernink:
I'm interested in this vastness of the problem, like the focused nature of your solution.
How are you going to expand this or scale this, or make sure that it like grows?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
So that that's been a learning curve because the science bit was kind of the easiest one for us and even doing the proof of concept and the validation and writing scientific papers to back the science.
So once the science worked and we've been patented the technology, we knew that, but it has to be everywhere. It doesn't make sense for people to build in the future without taking nature into consideration. It's not sustainable. And it's just not going to be a way for humanity to live onwards and that that's a given once people understand that any project should have these considerations for my perspective by law.
I mean, otherwise it will be a choice. And then people would say, yeah, we did a little bit of ecological engineering. We did some nice, the curation with ecological features in that part of the project and kind of ticked that off. No, that it has to be deeper. And it has to make sense. And that's where we want to see the impact and we'll do whatever is needed.
As a company, first of all, we need to make sure that the product is viable and scalable from a production perspective.
And happy to say that we designed it to be that way. So it's basically a technology platform that can be applied anywhere, with a very simple system. That was crucial for us.
In the future, we even see us, you know, like manufacturing the core component. Like we don't need to produce the moulds in Israel and send them. They can be manufactured according to blueprints.
So we're going to try and make that as, you know, as sustainable as possible and as scalable as possible.
And the other thing is to work with partnerships. That's where we're at now. So we are going to partner with the big cement companies, and with the landscape architects and with the engineering firms and work with the port authorities.
We already doing that in Rotterdam, for example, in San Diego in Monaco in Hamburg. So the idea is to do a lot of outreach and education about the whole concept and obviously to increase the span of our production capacity and distribution capacity.
Hopefully we'll also have competition. I know nobody can be alone in this space and we're already seeing some emerging technologies that are getting close to what we're doing. And I think that's great. It means we're in a good direction and it means that we could make this a global thing. And that's our, that's our scope.
Tessa Wernink:
If you say you're a company you've been around for like a while.
Can you say from a moment of start-up, to scale up, to established company, where do you think you are on that trajectory?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
So we incorporated in 2012 and as I mentioned, the validation process was quite long. We actually had to wait for corals and marine life to grow onto concrete, which takes time.
So we really started commercializing, I think around 2016. Even though we had active installations even before. The company today, I would say it's a scale-up. We are now shifting from a demonstration projects to a full-pledged projects I think.
Again you talked about challenges. In our industry, a project life cycle is between two to four years quite easily because we have to go in at the design phase. When somebody is dreaming about the waterfront and, we have to kind of be there in the process of design until the specifications of the project goes to a bid and include these features.
So, as a company, it's a challenge to live through that, endure that life cycle and go to the phase where we are now, which is finding partnerships to license that technology onwards.
We're just under 20 people and we're hoping to keep a very condensed team. We don't envision, you know, hundreds of offices and thousands of people working for us.
I think that partnerships can do that much more effectively and, that that's our vision.
So I'm looking forward to 2021 being kind of a turning point for us with some big projects going into construction.
Tessa Wernink:
One of the focus points of our series is how the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals can guide business.
In 2018, Shimrit was one of five women entrepreneurs to win the ‘We Empower’ UN SDG challenge. A first of its kind global business competition for female entrepreneurs advancing the SDGs.
Shimrit explains what the goals mean to her and how they feature in her work.
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
I think that having the sustainable development goals as kind of a beacon for where we need to go is excellent.
And I'm happy to say that we're seeing more and more companies align and actually commit to taking action because it has to be more than just goals and more than just, you know, slogans. That's what we're trying to do.
We are literally bringing concrete action to make those goals achievable. And we work at multiple levels, , inherently SDG 14 ‘Life below water is kind of our major goal. And we're very happy to take that on. It's been the least advanced SDG from all of them. It's received only like 13 or 14% of its targets to date.
And that's one that we're definitely taking into consideration with increased biodiversity and contributing to water clarity, and the rest.
Another goal is climate action. Which we are taking on from both mitigation and adaptation perspective. We're also contributing to the, the target of responsible consumption and production. I didn't mention, but our admix component kind of our secret sauce is made nearly entirely of byproducts.
And also when we are producing our moulds, for example, we're taking care of having as much as we can, separate materials and, you know, highly composite so that we can do, , circular economy components. Sustainable cities think about waterfronts that have much more life and much more community engagement.
And finally, I think even education. A lot of the things that we do are public spaces, and we want to educate people about the importance of marine life and, and resiliency and biodiversity. And we do quite a lot of engagement with communities, with schools, with local NGOs to kind of adhere to that.
And maybe finally last but not least, I think that gender equality, having a company that's woman led and we just see it as an equal opportunity company, 2 co-founders, one male, one female, no differences. It should be that way.
Tessa Wernink:
I read this nice quote by Arthur C. Clark. He said how inappropriate to call this planet earth when it's quite clearly an ocean.
And I thought that was a really interesting, way of saying that 70% of our planet is actually water.
Can you elaborate a little bit for me? Why this SDG of ‘Life Below Water’ is so important?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
Yes, unfortunately there's multiple problems. I think that a lot of people are now exposed and aware of some of the big problems like plastic pollution in our ocean and coral bleaching, ocean acidification.
These are part of our problem. I think that loss of biodiversity and extensions is another huge problem that. It's not getting enough attention. And in addition, loss of habitat is not receiving enough attention to my perspective.
And especially when we're losing those habitats because of, development and cities and communities.
And these are some of the things that needs to be taken care of. And it's inherent that we are considering these in any process that we were engaged in. If it's fishing, if it's shipping, if it's extraction of energy from the water. It looks like an infinite resource. It has been considered so for a long time, and unfortunately when we got to the tilting point, when the oceans are no longer steady and they're going into a phase shifts that are not reversible to a certain extent. That's when we woke up, it's almost too late. Some scientists say it's too late. Some scientists say, if we act now and scale our approaches, there's still time.
And that's what we're trying to do. I mean, we're not trying to scare anybody. We're just trying to drive people to action. And I think education is an integral part of that. So when we're going to keep on and extracting the resources from our oceans, we need to keep building them as well. Otherwise we will just be shooting ourselves in the foot and I'm hopeful that, , first of all, the science will help here.
And I think that there's more and more applied science, being engaged for that perspective.
I'm also hopeful that there are, you know, the process of natural selection will still help us, even though we're kind of accelerating the rate of change, which is not very much in line with natural succession.
But I know I was diving in Egypt last year in Sinai in places that I dove in 20 years ago. And I was afraid to go there. And I was afraid to find a horrible, devastated reefs. And actually it was amazing. So maybe because of having the diving industry, for example, in that region a little bit down all these years, because of political issues, probably, the research doing well.
And even though it was 30 degrees Celsius in 30 meters of water, which is insane, the reef was amazing.
Tessa Wernink:
The urgency of addressing our global problems and slowing down climate change cannot be overstated. One of the reasons I make this podcast with Impossible is to show everyone how people all over the world are using their expertise to put the planet first.
Positive stories work, but to move from an idea to concrete action, tools and methodologies can help.
And that's why Impossible has developed what they call climate centric, design methodology. It's for anyone who is setting up or wanting to redesign a project to have positive impact on our planet and society.
It's free to download from their site. Just go to Impossible.com or follow the link in the bio.
In the meantime, listen on, as I asked Shimrit to tell me where her passion for the sea and her vocation came from.
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
Yeah. So I felt very curious and I felt like, instead of looking at the coastline is the end of the city. It's actually the beginning of a beautiful place that we don't know enough about.
And that's what drove me to explore. For me, it's almost like the closest thing to artist space. Imagine we're putting on dive suits and we're going down and we need to use tanks to breathe. It's as close to going to the moon or something. And there's still so much to explore.
So I realized, I think only when I was 30, that when I was 16, 17 and doing my high school project on biology because I took biology in high school. It was on the breakwaters of Tel Aviv. And I remember taking Marine snails, limpets, taking them home and playing with experiments on gravitation and ,photo taxes. And I guess that stuck in me.
And as soon as I finished the military service, which in Israel is mandatory, for women as well. So I immediately went and took a dive course and I've been really diving ever since. And I was also very fortunate to have a lot of experience in different countries throughout my academic and my professional career. I think I dove in over 30 countries now. And I've seen places, especially I think around Africa that I believe have hardly seen other people.
I mean, I wouldn't compare myself to any, you know, Jacques Cousteau or Charlie Veron, which is kind of the guru of coral reefs. But for me I'm content. I mean, I've had really good share of experience and I'm keen on keep on exploring and diving in places other than piers and ports.
Tessa Wernink:
If you look over at your path to getting to where you are now, , can you think about what are the moments that were pivotal or like that are really important to you?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
Definitely meeting my co-founder was a pivotal moment and the synergy between us. We both remember the night we were in Africa on a boat doing the night shift on and watching the dive gear and everything. And that's where we came up with the concept of how can we work on seascape architecture basically?
How can we make the change? So that, that was a moment that I distinctly remember that we decided to go for this as a future mission.
And I think there are moments along the way. I mean, the first time that you see an installation of the product and I remember just recently seeing some children with the buckets collecting crabs off of our tide pools in the coastline here in Tel Aviv. And they could have gone on the rocks around it, but no, they were on our product and that's where the crabs were.
So that for me was a small, big success. And I hope to see that scale.
Tessa Wernink:
I can imagine being like quite emotional might be too much, but it's an endearing image of like kids.
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
Yeah. It's like it's working. It was almost the same when we deployed the first armor blocks, which is, it's a huge chunk of concrete. And we designed different sizes of holes to accommodate for different fish and like even before it had any significant life on the concrete, the fish came to the holes and every fish had a hole.
And that was another thing that we felt like, yeah, we're doing something right here.
Tessa Wernink:
I came across Shimrit and her project through a friend at the Biomimicry Institute.
ECOncrete won the Ray of Hope prize in August 2020, honoring them for the way they have mimicked nature in their solutions for our planet.
I asked she would eat to tell me how they used biomimicry and why it's important to them when looking toward the future.
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
So I think we didn't even really look at the actual definition of biomimicry. We just acted upon it. I think for many years, until we really met the Biomimicry Institute and we're so grateful to have won the Ray of Hope.
Which is basically honouring the Life's works of Ray Anderson for his biomedical work. And the concept of biomimicry is really looking at how nature does it. So what are nature's way from our perspective of defending our coastlines. These are mangrove beds, these are oyster reefs.
These are coral reefs.
And we're looking for inspiration from those ecosystems and we're kind of translating them to a commercial product. And for ECOncrete we do that biomimicry kind of envelope on multiple layers of the technology.
So from a material perspective, we had to use an additive that helps the concrete be more benign. More like a natural composition, from a surface texture perspective.
Again, we draw inspiration from features like oysters and corals at the micro level. And at the macro level, we are striving to mimic ecosystem functions. So we're looking at how nature does it. We're translating it to an applied technology that will keep in tune with nature.
So that's, Biomimicry us, basically.
Tessa Wernink:
For everyone who's interested, there's so much out there on concrete. One of the things I read was indeed that concrete has been human’s way to kind of, would you call it shield itself from nature, but that actually after a while, it actually makes all this climate change, it amplifies it.
So, because it creates heat pools in cities and like, it can't soak up the rain and stuff.
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
And I think that here I might add a point. I wish we didn't have to use concrete. And it's funny for me to say that and I hope my board of directors doesn't kill me afterwards. I don't want to sell my product.
I want people to move away from the oceans. And to let for natural realignment to occur. And I wish we could have only used nature-based solutions and living shorelines. The problem is that it's not feasible. It's not practical. And we feel comfortable saying that only when all of those options have been exhausted and there has been kind of an executive decision by engineers or product developers that we have to build concrete structures here, that's where it has to be with environmentally sensitive and nature, inclusive technologies like ours,
So that we make sure that we do have ecosystem functions and biodiversity when we are doing hard costs to defenses.
So that's kind of something that we always say on every presentation that we're doing that, I don't want to say we're the last resort, but, we would love everybody to explore alternatives before going into any hard armor.
Tessa Wernink:
Yeah thanks.
It's like the vision behind the vision is basically we need to really look at natural products. Again, this is a good step in the right direction.
So why did you start a company? Why not something else?
What is the benefit of actually being in business?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
We felt like it's our way to really make an impact.
If it were stayed in academia, it might've been studied to death as we say. I mean we probably would have been stuck with a different level of optimization and statistical analysis. We wanted to make this impactful in wanting to step out of that kind of comfort zone for us of doing just science.
We keep doing science, wherever we go, but we also implement and on the other end of the spectrum , I'd say, why aren't we, an NGO or something like a nonprofit.
Again, some of these processes that we're doing to accelerate, the Applied Science require funding. That's not always available unless you go to kind of venture backed corporate structure.
Tessa Wernink:
Yeah, and I mean, your project is so huge in the probably the space you even need to just make your product like a bid.
What kind of investors are we talking about? What kind of buyers are you in talks with and investors?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
Well, we started off with angel investors did, and are still with us and we really appreciate their, their ongoing support.
And then we moved to impact investors which backed us up since probably 2017, 18. And just now in our current round, Bridges Israel, which is a part of Bridges International, one of very strong impact investment venture capital firms is leading our round.
It also helps us quantify our impact. It helps us stay with those goals of having impact criteria, an integral part of our DNA.
But we're also now getting additional investments. We've had investment through a RE-Lab, which is kind of a PropTech or real estate tech incubator that helps us.
Going to that space, we now just had an additional investment from a construction company that has a venture arm.
So we're looking at the blend of strategic and impact investment and who knows in the future, where we'll go. I could see some, potential investments coming from CVCs corporate VCs, because some of those big corporates out there, that need us could have a very good alignment, even taking a stake in the company.
Tessa Wernink:
So you do now talking about investors, but for example, the port of Rotterdam or San Diego, they are your buyers, but are they also in some way investors or co-creators or how does it work with the supply chain?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
No. So they're basically different levels of customers for us.
The port industry is a very big client, or let's say segment of the market for us, because obviously there's a lot of commercial ports.
But we are also engaged in other segments, like the offshore wind arena, Our go to market is quite elaborate as you understand, it's a challenging business, what can I say?
Typically, the entity that buys our technology and uses it to do the casting work is a concrete manufacturer.
We don't pitch to them. They just adhere to the standards and to the specifications of the project. We have to talk to the engineers, design build firms, landscape architects, project managers, the owners of the properties which can be the port or to city.
And we have to sell them the concept so that they requested as a part of their project.
And it will actually adhere to the technical specifications of the project, that will be adopted by the concrete manufacturer. So it's quite a long process.
There's a lot of different stakeholders engaged. There's layers of consultants along the way, and we're taking the time to educate all of them.
Tessa Wernink:
It just feels like it's the wrong way around that you have to sell a good product to all these people. While actually it was required that people used better concrete, that they would find you.
What kind of people do you surround yourself with to build this company? What kind of mindsets do they have, skills, talents?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
So I'll actually start with my co-founder. I didn't mention his name. His name is Ido Sella. Both of us are PhDs in Marine Ecology, so he's kind of my half brain. We kind of say that we share a brain.
I do a lot of the business development networking, around the sales process and he's more of the technical person. He's working on the product development, R &D et cetera.
And then we have a super diverse team in house. So we have Biologists, Ecologists, Coastal and Marine Engineers, Concrete Technologists, Product Designers, Industrial Designers, all amazing team. And then obviously we have some professionals around, Marketing and Sales. Apart from that, we tried to tap into expertise of various strategic consultants, obviously.
And we use our Board of Directors and sometimes our investors as a sounding board to any kind of business decisions. So it's kind of a group effort. And as I mentioned with respect to partnerships and a little bit of a higher level works going into lobbying, et cetera, sometimes we just use, , professional firms, to support that.
And, I think partnerships is something that is inherent for us.
Tessa Wernink:
I hear continuous learning or maybe uncertainty with the people that work for you. Do they have a certain mindset?
Is it purpose driven?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
I think that we are very much multidisciplinary people and out of the box type of thinkers.
And we love to collaborate. That's very core to our kind of DNA of the company.
Curiosity, and I think it comes to affect also in the IP that we produce. We come up with crazy, you know innovation around mould systems and concrete, obviously, which is not our core expertise, because we just want to solve problems and we want to do it in a way that's practical.
Tessa Wernink:
Can you give me one thing that you're dealing with right now that is like unresolved or you don't really know how to move forward or something that's unresolved,
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
It's one of our barriers at the moment is to get a more quantifiable return on investment. The technology we are very clear on the biological added value.
We can quantify easily, but at the moment the industry and the policies are not very much aligned with giving that a money tag. So how much more would you pay to double the biodiversity?
If nobody's asking you to do that, you might say, I don't want to spend even a cent more on biodiversity and it shouldn't be that way.
So now one of our challenges is to use different tools and hopefully to drive these processes also onwards to give the kind of monetary value for the impact that we're providing, and do that at multiple levels.
So first on the biological and ecological impacts, and then also on the strength, one of the challenges that we have is to quantify how much, let's say longevity, we're going to gain because of the higher performance of the concrete that we are manufacturing and potentially how less maintenance we will have. So these are things that take time to quantify. That's something that's unresolved.
We give assumptions and projections, but it's not based on data because we don't have a 30 year old ECOncrete breakwater to show that you paid less to maintain it.
And it's, quite essential to our offering to our value proposition. And we can explain it, but I think that until we have a little bit more acceptance from the market to the fact that we do need to give a price deck to these things like carbon, you know, if you would talk about 10 years ago about carbon and the value of carbon offsetting, it was miles away from what we have today with calculators.
So I want to have biodiversity calculators. That will be a clear ROI for any project and we'll make these technologies. A no-brainer, you know, you, you just couldn't do something without taking that into consideration.
Tessa Wernink:
My last question for asking you the guests is what is one belief that you hold true?
That if it turned out to be untrue, would render your work irrelevant?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
Maybe it's a matter of timescale. I mean, are we looking at these things at the right timescale and are we worried about our impact rightfully?
Maybe if we would have been looking at this at a different scale, we would say we're just a blimp and, why worry?
I don't believe that, but that would definitely change my perspective.
Tessa Wernink:
My previous guest was Melanie Rieback.
She had writing a book on Post Growth Entrepreneurship, and her question was what are 3 books that have influenced you most?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
I don't think my answer would be that in line with the messages that I'm giving, because as a child I always read science fiction but maybe that opened my imagination. So, I think, like The Hobbit. It was probably one of my favorites growing up.
As an adult, I think, it's a little bit more technical books. It sounds funny, but the coral taxonomy was something, It's a book by Charlie Veron about reticulate evolution, it talks about genetic pathways in coral reefs, which I found really inspirational.
And I would mention finally, a book that was just was published, by Vital Voices, called 100 Women Using Their Power to Empower. And I'm so proud and to be a part of that list. So I have a one page on my work in there with many amazing other inspirational women.
And I would encourage all of you to go ahead and, and buy the book, which is a donation as well. And there's a lot of women that have done exceptional work around victims across the globe to women victims and just women power.
So that's kind of two books that's coming to mind.
Tessa Wernink:
Thank you. I think there's something in there for everyone. yeah.
It's your turn to ask a question. Do you have a question for my next guest?
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
What would the future look like? Post COVID? With respect the interface between humans and the urban environment.
I've been feeling that we've had kind of a gradual change with how we perceive our living space and our cities and the natural environment in the urban environments.
So I think a good question will be how do we see ourselves post COVID any major changes to the way we live?
Tessa Wernink:
I like the idea of gradual change that we can’t perceive, but I also sense that there's definitely a change.
Thanks so much for taking the time today. It was really nice to get to know you better and also your mission through ECOncrete. Thank you
Shimrit Perkol Finkel:
Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure and thank you for all the listeners. Hopefully I gave you some food for thought.
Tessa Wernink:
This episode is just one of many interviews recorded for this podcast series.
Go to whatifwegetitright.com to hear more stories from people around the world who are putting the health of the planet at the centre of their business.
If you're ready to move forward, your own idea, you can download a planet centric, design toolkit at Impossible.