Partner profile

arc marine

ARC Marine is focused on accelerating reef creation and biodiversity through eco-engineering. Based in Devon and Cornwall in the UK, they design, manufacture and install nature-based solutions in the marine environment.

Location

What does ARC Marine do?

ARC Marine is a company that’s focused on accelerating reef creation and biodiversity. We do that through eco-engineering, meaning we design, manufacture and install nature-based solutions in the marine environment.

First, all of our products are made from our Marine Crete, a concrete like material without all of the bad bits. It can be poured into a mould, is settable, currently consists of 98% recycled materials, is carbon neutral and can be carbon negative, and is free from toxins, plastics and other leachates. This makes it the perfect material for making marine infrastructure and nature-based solutions that accelerate retroactive processes.

Our flagship technology product is the reef cube®.

This is a Marine Crete cube shape structure with six passageways leading to a spherical chamber that is used to create marine habitats and restore reefs. reef cubes® allow us to create tailor engineered solutions to protect offshore installations, eg wind farms, that double up as a marine habitat. With a few tweaks, we can engineer them for the specific area and for the marine life that exists there, scaling to any size to cater for certain species, certain life cycles and for specific met ocean conditions.

We also make our Marine Matts that protect subsea cables and pipelines whilst enhancing the marine environment. Over 80,000 traditional concrete mattresses have been deployed off the UK continental shelf since the oil & gas boom, filled with plastic materials and high CO₂ concrete that leach metals and other additives from the concrete making process. Our replacement version uses Marine Crete and it’s carbon negative, plastic free and includes nature inclusive design features such as a fully customised texturizing to cater for marine species as well as crustacean burrows.

We believe that there is an unprecedented opportunity to mitigate marine biodiversity loss by using our products and technologies.

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Which industries will benefit the most from what you can offer?

Primarily, offshore energy developers as a whole; not just renewables, as we can have a positive impact on oil and gas as well.

Secondly, coastal infrastructure, so predominantly ports, harbours and coastal defences that need to be raised due to rising sea levels from climate change. For example, San Francisco is developing a $13 billion coastal defence scheme as their modelling shows that by 2100 the storm surge could be 7 foot above the current sea defence. But all of that is going to be concrete, so why emit even more greenhouse gases to raise those defences when that’s what created this position in the first place? And why not integrate nature inclusive designs to convert the coastline into thriving ecosystems?

Thirdly, land reclamation, for example so-called “giga projects” in the Middle East and Asia that are reclaiming huge amounts of land from the sea for tourism resorts etc. and creating hundreds and thousands of kilometres of new coastline. However, they often encroach on reef ecosystems and marine habitats, so we want to ensure that we cater for the marine life that would naturally be there.

Ultimately ARC Marine wants to be at the intersection of engineering and the ocean to make sure it’s done correctly.

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What benefits does a partnership between ARC Marine and Mercuria create?

I’m hoping that ARC Marine can develop reef cubes® to be the best biodiversity and carbon credit product in the world. If we manage that, Mercuria has the ability to create the opportunities to generate the best value for it, enabling us to further our work in the marine environment and have an even greater impact.

As Mercuria is a global energy and commodities group, they already work with numerous offshore development and construction companies that could potentially become huge customers of ours. We hope to be able leverage those relationships so that these companies can use our technology as standard around these installations.

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Describe the importance of ARC Marine recently becoming a B Corp.

In a world where a lot of companies claim to be sustainable, B Corp is probably the most rigorous certification to test the claims a company is making, and we wanted to do it to prove to people that we take this seriously.

Only when we started to look into it, we realised it’s much more than purely environmental credentials. One part that resonated with ARC Marine was how employees are treated. We all wanted to be part of a company where we’re both empowered and also rewarded, but we didn’t know what to call it. On the back of the B Corp, we’ve now set up an Employee Benefit Trust & options scheme so at least 20% of our shareholding will be held by staff on a fully diluted basis, following in the footsteps of other forward-thinking companies like Patagonia.

We also made changes to our articles of association so employees, shareholders and future investors know that these aren’t just words on a pitch deck, but rather something that runs to the core of the company.

It also involves an annual commitment to maintain it and that’s important for us because there is so much greenwashing going on and so many companies that claim to be sustainable but aren’t. And that creates a real risk to the industries that we operate in, with companies getting misled by false claims and then not wanting to work within our sector or are sceptical about oour claims.

In short, at ARC Marine we try and be the best at everything we do and when we looked at what the best eco-certification we could get was, it was B Corp, so we decided to go for it.