What is Bioengineering?

Bioengineering is the process of combining traditional engineering pratices such as rip rap with living material such as plants. This could include planting willow on a rip rap site to provide improved system strength once the willows grow over rip rap alone. Bioengineering can move all the way up to green shoreline solutions such as our Envirolok system, which combines geotextile (engineered) products with biological components such as soils and plant material. The key concept with bioengineering versus traditional hard armour engineering solutions is this, a bioengineered system is the weakest the day that it is installed. This makes sense, seeing your plant materials have to grow, and as they continue to grow and root into the engineered components, they become continually stronger. With traditional engineered solutions for shoreline stabilization, they are the strongest the day they are installed, and get weaker as time passes. This too makes sense. Just think of your concrete drive way, it is very strong at first, but as weather, time, and exposure take their toll is continually breaks down.

Why Use Bioengineering?

As stated above bioengineering combines the steadfast principles of engineering with plant life. As a result you can take an engineered system, who’s strengths are fully calculated and make it many times stronger with plant material. Also consider the environmental and habitat benefits to adding plant materials to an engineered shoreline system. If you take a rip rap shoreline and add willows and dogwoods, as well as some rootwads, you can just imagine the difference to habitat and the overall aesthetics of this system. Now replace this rip rap with a 100% green growing system like Envirolok and you have an engineered system that when fully established is completed covered with vegetation, truly a win-win.