ENVIROLE INC. · PUERTO RICO · FOUNDED 2020
Envirole is a Puerto Rico–based 501(c)(3) restoring eroded beaches, building resilient shoreline infrastructure, and running the research that keeps both honest — starting on the coast our founder grew up on.
“We lost our beaches.”
WHY THIS WORK
After Hurricane María cut off Puerto Rico's sediment supply in September 2017, many of the island's beaches stopped rebuilding themselves. On the north coast, the continental shelf drops steeply into the Puerto Rico Trench — sand pulled offshore in a storm often goes over that edge and is gone for good, not washed back in by the next calm season.
What's left is a slower, quieter kind of damage: narrowing beaches, more exposed coastline, and fewer places for storm surge to lose its energy before it reaches a house. Envirole exists to put sediment, structure, and stewardship back where the ocean took them — and to make the communities closest to the water safer for it, not just prettier.
The record backs this up: the U.S. Geological Survey maintains a century-long shoreline-change compilation for Puerto Rico, and NOAA's post-María aerial damage survey documented the coastline within days of the storm. Our restoration designs start from that public data, not from guesswork.
PROGRAM AREAS
Restoration only holds if it's paired with the infrastructure, water security, and research that keep a shoreline community standing between storms.
Sediment-transport modeling and site-specific restoration design grounded in Puerto Rico's own hydrology — not imported, one-size-fits-all coastal engineering.
A restored beach only lasts if it supports the people near it. We design off-grid infrastructure — the Sustainable Beach Kiosk Module — that turns a rebuilt coastline into clean facilities, local commerce, and recurring work.
Puerto Rico's post-María failures were rarely about water sources — they were about centralized, grid-dependent distribution that fails all at once. We build toward decentralized systems that keep working when the grid doesn't.
Recurring sargassum blooms and marine debris damage tourism and reef health across the region every year. We're developing ways to harvest it into construction material — hurricane-tested sargassum building blocks already exist elsewhere in the Caribbean; we're adapting that approach for our own deployments.
A standing coastal-monitoring program — shoreline change, sediment budgets, and the long-term data Puerto Rico's own recovery still runs short of.
DEPLOYMENT 01
Ponce is where this starts — not because it's the island's worst erosion, but because it's home. The south coast sits in calmer Caribbean waters, largely spared the worst of María's direct hit, and its nearshore is shallower and more buildable than the Atlantic side.
Playa de Ponce and the historic La Guancha boardwalk are already mid-revival, backed by a municipal, ARPA-funded effort bringing food trucks and artisan stands back to the waterfront. What that effort doesn't reach is the beach itself — rocky, current-prone, "not particularly the tourist place" as our founder puts it. Envirole's role is the other half of the equation: make the beach match the boardwalk.
The first Sustainable Beach Kiosk Module is in design now — rainwater cistern supply, greywater drainage, composting sanitation, and solar power, engineered with the same floodplain-hydraulics methodology behind our founder's own graduate research. One deployment funds the design and permitting of the next.
Fig. 01 — kiosk module, first-pass concept (not final spec)
WHO'S BEHIND THIS
Envirole is led by a construction engineer whose graduate research focused on floodplain analysis and FEMA flood-zone map amendments — the same hydraulics and permitting expertise now going into every kiosk-module design.
This isn't outsourced coastal consulting. It's a small, family-rooted team building the coastline it grew up on.
Envirole Inc. is recognized by the IRS as a tax-exempt public charity. Our determination can be verified through the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search under EIN 66-0943464.
GET INVOLVED
Envirole is early — the first deployment is still in design, not yet built. That's exactly the stage where a grant, a municipal partnership, or a volunteer engineer makes the most difference.
Reach out directly — formal giving channels are still being set up.