Excessive duckweed is detrimental to aquatic biodiversity but is nutrient rich, while urban areas are faced with extensive paving and reduced biodiversity. Flip the City transforms this duckweed into easy-to-use biodegradable plant tiles that support the growth of biodiverse flowers and plants, creating a win-win scenario that improves both urban and aquatic biodiversity and conditions.
Co-Founder at Flip the City, 2023 – 2024
With: Hidde Griek
Funded by: Provincie Zuid-Holland, RVO
Recognition: Dutch Design Week, Milan Design Week, New European Bauhaus Finalist, national TV
Flip the City, a startup founded in 2020, is addressing these issues by turning duckweed into biodegradable plant tiles that improve urban biodiversity, water drainage and heat stress. Turning a problem into a win-win solution, these tiles use the nutrient richness of duckweed to support a wide range of biodiversity enhancing plants and flowers, while increasing aquatic biodiversity and helping to sequester carbon and store nitrogen. Each 30x30cm tile is easy to plant and contains 31 biological seeds of plants and flowers selected to attract pollinators and other wildlife in specific areas of the Netherlands.
My main role as co-founder is to design Flip the City’s product for the market and scale, focusing on making production cost effective and optimising production to reduce the time needed per tile from 40 minutes to 2 minutes, making it more accessible to a wider audience. We have won several awards and have been featured on national TV (3x), in newspapers and at international exhibitions. Flip the City was recognised as one of the top 100 innovative Dutch companies of 2023 according to KVK, was a startup in residence at provincie Zuid-Holland, was a finalist in the European Union’s New European Bauhaus and was presented at Dutch Design Week, Milan Design Week [IT], Museum Cuypershuis, Hubertusburg Castle [DE] and others. Tiles have been sold in The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.
