Clean Water Action: 2NDNATURE Disrupts the Rain-to-Pollution Cycle

Nicole Beck at The Nature Conservancy’s Techstars event.

Nicole Beck, founder and CEO of 2NDNATURE, inherited her fascination with natural science from her father.

 “I think my whole entire love of nature comes from my dad, and his old-time Sonoma County family,” she says. “He's a cowboy, and a hunter, and him and his buddies, they're incredible. They knew every plant, every tree, every flower, every bug and animal. They were the best naturalists I've ever met, and not formally trained. That was what really inspired me to better understand water flow, and how it forms landscapes.”

Beck’s company, which earned a coveted spot in The Nature Conservancy’s 2019 Techstars Sustainability Accelerator, is working to get two big wins by focusing on one big problem: stormwater, the urban runoff that finds its way from highways, streets and parking lots into streams and oceans.

 In your Techstars pitch, you note that stormwater is the fastest growing source of water pollution in the state of California. Minutes before it becomes stormwater, when the rain is still in the storm, it’s the most precious resource in the state of California. So how did you come up with the idea of capturing this resource before it becomes a pollutant?

I got a PhD in aquatic chemistry from UC Santa Cruz, where I worked with an awesome chemical oceanographer. And I was always interested in the applied side of chemistry, and with land management—its impact on the quality and quantity of water. So out of grad school I was really interested in the question: What are we getting for the money we’re spending? Whether it’s stream restoration or stormwater programs.

 We did a bunch of work in Lake Tahoe, and two things came out of that “Keep Tahoe Blue” lesson. One: The primary source of pollutants impairing lake clarity was inorganic material, which means, it’s not algae—it’s dirt. Really fine dirt, which happens to be all over the roadways in the Tahoe basin.

 And the second thing I learned, and what really drives stormwater management, is a regulatory requirement: That every city and county in the country that’s spending taxpayers’ dollars must comply with the Clean Water Act. So there’s a compelling regulatory driver, and a payer— a regulatory stick chasing the clean-water carrot.

 Can you talk a little more about the money part of this lesson?

 There are always public projects to control stormwater, whether it’s reducing flooding or improving water quality. Green infrastructure [such as empty “dry bed” fields—low-lying areas that can be flooded] is a great solution because we can put water back into the ground, and it naturally filters pollutants.

 It’s never been about taking the agricultural field out, or taking the road out, or restoring the city to the way it was before there were any humans. That’s impossible. We are interested in: What’s the new dynamic equilibrium where humans and nature’s can coexist?

 Please tell me about 2NDNATURE’s SaaS product.

 At a minimum what we’re doing is digitizing municipal stormwater programs, whether it’s for regulators or permitees. Right now, everything is in spreadsheets—it’s all analog, the classic pre-disruption-of-technology situation. All of these permitees have requirements to collect information, submit annual reports to the regulators showing how they are complying. The first thing we do is streamline that, consolidate, centralize, align all that information using mobile applications, and store everything in a geospatial information management system.

 Once we get the right data and put it in an efficient system, we can do analytics on that. So now we have a way to quantify out of the urban landscape the reduction in volume out of the pipe. And then monitor pollutant loads and roadside trash as well.

Green infrastructure can include undeveloped urban spaces, and even parking lots.

 You work with municipalities throughout the Monterey Bay region and beyond, and your first client was the City of Salinas. How did that come about, and how is it going?

 In 2012, Salinas was way out of compliance—all the waterways were just in horrible condition. The regulator issued a really proscriptive permit that led to an EPA audit in 2014. Things just weren’t good.

 We had a strong relationship with Salinas‘s regional regulator, and we got an opportunity to work with the city when we launched in 2017, and we transformed their program.

 We digitized their stormwater data, helped them prioritize where investments and opportunities existed, helped them get information required by the regulators in…let’s say one-tenth of the time, and put all of their information—their green infrastructure assets, their waterways— into a system.

 And just this September, they had to re-issue the permit; it just passed and was adopted. And I think we came up with one of the better permits out there, and will probably set the stage for permits moving forward throughout the state of California, which is awesome.

 Then, just three weeks ago, Global Water Intelligence [a publisher serving the international water industry] reported that a community-based private entity formed a partnership to co-manage the city’s stormwater program. I think by the end of the month they will be announcing a $50 million private investment into implementation of green infrastructure assets within the city of Salinas. And 2NDNATURE is the accounting system for that performance-based investment and repayment program over a 30 year time period.

 Yours is one of a bunch of tech companies, including several in the biotech or environmental science fields, to come out of UC Santa Cruz in recent years. And there are a number of other tech companies joining the legacy firms here in Silicon Valley’s beach-town satellite. How does all of this local tech energy impact your company?

 Well, this is kind of funny – I was just traveling back from Denver on Southwest, and Shark Tank was on, and I saw [local electric skateboard and scooter builder] Inboard. I had heard they were on the show, and so that was kind of cool. Right now we are still only 15 people. Our campus footprint is solidly where it’s been for a while. But as soon as we start looking to hire and as we expand, which seems like things are going in that direction, we’ll get more involved with [Santa Cruz Works] and start looking for local talent.

 We’ve got a great community and a great way of life.