CAMDEN —Camden Hills Regional High School is recognizing four Hatchery Innovation Center students who won an entrepreneurial competition called the Energy Project through the Puranik Foundation. The foundation works with teams of high-school students to create sustainable energy technologies and awards a grant to the winners to help bring their innovations to market. 

Five teams from Energy Institute High School in Houston, Texas and one team from Camden Hills Regional High School in Rockport participated in the Energy Project. Students worked through a curriculum of design-thinking, prototyping, business planning, and mentorships, then pitched their ideas to a panel of judges in April. 

The winning team, consisting of Maggie Blood, Tula Bradley-Prindiville, Olivia Huard, and Laura Riordan, developed eco-friendly dock billets that use mycelium – root-like filaments of fungi – in place of petroleum-based foam, encapsulated in upcycled 55-gallon drums. With the Puranik Foundation’s $15,000 award grant, the students will soon establish a small business called Refoam Maine to continue research and design of their product, and, by next summer, demonstrate its viability by floating docks in our own harbor with their mycelium-based billets.

Riordan said in a news release that the inspiration for their idea came from an issue close to home.

“As a team, we approached the Energy Project challenge by trying to assess what area in our community needs innovation. When we looked around Maine – through the lens of what looks bad for the planet – we saw a lot of polystyrene foam. If you walk on beaches or islands, there is polystyrene everywhere … we identified our ‘problem space’ to be expanded polystyrene breaking off of dock flotation units, polluting the ocean, and entering the food chain.”

As part of their research, the team reached out to professionals working within the same ‘problem space,’ including Sue Van Hook, an expert mycologist in Maine who has been developing mycelium-based buoys for years. Talking with Van Hook forced the team to find its niche within this field of research, while still advancing the shared goal of creating sustainable alternatives to petroleum-based marine gear. 

When looking to the future of their product, Riordan noted the enthusiasm of her classmates at Camden Hills, “we’ve had a lot of students ask how they can get involved, so once we are into the full-scale prototyping phase, I anticipate working with other students in the Hatchery Workshop to help us grow floats and join our effort to ‘Refoam Maine.’”