A Bright Meadow Group overview
Every once in a while, a project grows large enough that you have to step back, take a breath, and admit that it’s no longer “an idea I’m working on.”
It becomes something bigger—something with its own gravity and direction.
Over this past year, what began as a handful of sketches and a stubborn belief that we could do better by our waterways quietly matured into a fully integrated system. And today, I’m proud to share the first public release of that work:
The River Refugium Project.
At its heart, the RRP is a simple idea dressed in a lot of practical engineering:
Take nutrient-polluted river water, clean it, and turn the captured waste into something useful.
That’s it.
Everything else is just the mechanics of making that process reliable, scalable, and economically intelligent.
The system is built as a series of linked modules—water intake, biofiltration, evaporation beds, controlled-environment greenhouses, algae production, and a thermochemical backend that converts wet biomass into biochar and bio-crude. Each part supports the next. Nothing is wasted. Every output becomes someone else’s input.
I jokingly describe it as “literally turning shit to shinola,” and while the phrase is fun, the truth behind it is serious and needed.
Rivers across the country are carrying nutrient loads that create dead zones downstream. Farms struggle with runoff. Municipalities aren’t built to treat diffuse pollution. And we’ve left a lot of degraded land sitting idle along riverbanks, waiting for a purpose.
The River Refugium Project is meant to give that land a job again.
This morning, the Cernunnos Foundation released the high-level whitepaper that outlines the full architecture of the system—how it works, why it works, and how an RRP node can clean water while producing fibers, biomass, algae, hydrochar, bio-crude, and clean return water.
That document now lives permanently on the CF website, and Bright Meadow Group will be handling all future development, documentation, and site-specific design work around the project.
But here on the Blue Ribbon Team, we’ll be doing something different.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be writing a series that walks through each part of the RRP in approachable terms—what each component does, why the order matters, what the operating logic looks like, and how the whole thing behaves like a single living system. No jargon for the sake of jargon. No gatekeeping. Just open, honest explanations about a system built to help people and landscapes at the same time.
If you’d like to start with the official document, you can download it here:
Whether you’re curious, skeptical, excited, or just trying to understand why someone would turn river water into cotton, algae, and bio-oil—all are welcome. That’s what this space is for.
More soon. We’re only at the beginning.
