Our Vision and History

Envisioning a world where farms and food producers thrive, while ensuring clean and healthy waterways for all!

GSR’s origins date back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when its co-founders were advancing a novel application of general systems theory to the study of complex, self-organizing, adaptive ecological systems. Conventional linear and reductionist models often could not adequately capture the nonlinear interactions, feedback loops, and emergent behaviors present in nutrient cycles, energy flows, and ecological networks. The founders’ research emphasized integrative frameworks capable of describing and managing these dynamics, providing a conceptual foundation for the development of practical biotechnology solutions to address challenges in agriculture, water quality, and sustainable resource recovery.

This work demonstrated the versatility of their novel General Systems Research (GSR) concept, first applied to ecological studies in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, and later adapted it to nutrient management challenges at the University of Maryland in 2001, where, they collaborated with leading scientists addressing nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the Chesapeake Bay, highlighting the concept’s applicability from complex natural ecosystems to targeted environmental issues with global relevance.

In the early 2000s, the founders expanded their research from the Mid-Atlantic to the Northeast through teaching and research affiliations at the University of Vermont, where nutrient runoff in the Lake Champlain Basin presented an urgent environmental challenge. Their work focused on building an ecosystem services platform and advancing nutrient recovery concepts through applied research.

After nearly a decade of developing a novel systems-based approach, they transformed their passion for general systems research and their direct experience with Chesapeake Bay and Lake Champlain into a mission: creating value from waste nutrient inflows. This led to the formation of General Systems Research (GSR) in 2008, which pioneered technologies for managing nutrient runoff.

By 2014, the company was reorganized as GSR Solutions LLC, with a vision to transform agricultural, food, and industrial nutrient waste into valuable resources, serving the nexus of food, water, and energy while safeguarding natural ecosystems. Today, GSR Solutions operates with the following objectives:

• Generate high-value products from rapidly growing waste streams, leveraging GSR’s patented technology to benefit both host site operations and expanding market sectors.
• Capture waste stream nutrients at the source / point of production , improving regional water quality and mitigating nutrient-driven eutrophication in critical watersheds such as Lake Champlain, Lake Erie, Chesapeake Bay, and the Gulf of America / Gulf of Mexico, as well as globally significant estuaries, rivers, and coastal systems. These improvements reduce treatment costs, protect aquatic food sources, preserve property values, sustain tourism, and safeguard public health.
• Reduce escalating waste treatment costs in the face of population growth, food insecurity, and freshwater scarcity—enabling industries and communities to overcome waste management limitations while fostering sustainable business growth.

Our Historical Milestones

Several years of sustained R&D at GSR—supported by competitive U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programs through the EPA, USDA, DOE, and NSF—culminated in the development of proprietary, cutting-edge technologies. These solutions harness microbiological dynamics to transform excessive nutrients, which would otherwise impair natural water bodies and impose significant costs on municipalities and industries, into stable, high-value products.

GSR has developed a patented, scalable biotechnology platform that transforms nutrient-rich agricultural and industrial waste streams into high-value products, converting costly liabilities into revenue-generating assets. At the core of this platform are proprietary high-performance strains—diverse microalgae and supporting microbial consortia—engineered to efficiently metabolize excess nitrogen and phosphorus.

This technology enables the production of organic fertilizers, soil amendments, nutritional and pharmaceutical ingredients, animal feed for aquaculture and livestock, and liquid biofuels—while simultaneously treating wastewater for reclamation and reuse. By integrating advanced microbial processes with biomass production, GSR delivers a single solution that reduces treatment costs, ensures regulatory compliance, and taps into multi-billion-dollar global markets across the food, water, and energy sectors.

Building on this foundation, GSR has further advanced its platform from R&D to commercial-scale deployment, with its technology already generating organic fertilizers that are actively sold in the market. At commercial scale, GSR’s technology is actively treating farm waste, capturing excess nutrients that would otherwise contribute to pollution, and transforming them into marketable, revenue-generating products. This proven performance demonstrates the platform’s ability to deliver both environmental compliance and profitable resource recovery.

What We Stand For

GSR Solutions LLC (“GSR”), headquartered in Burlington, Vermont, was reorganized in 2014 to commercialize advanced biotechnology for nutrient waste management. The company addresses a critical global challenge: the treatment of polluting nutrient-rich effluents generated by agricultural livestock operations, food and beverage manufacturing, and other industries processing organic material. These nutrient discharges are a primary contributor to water pollution in natural waterways and are subject to stringent oversight by federal and state regulatory agencies, including the the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and state-level agricultural and environmental agencies.

GSR originated from General Systems Research LLC (founded in 2008), an R&D-focused enterprise dedicated to advancing innovation in bioenergy and supporting emerging technologies. Building on this foundation, GSR has developed proprietary biotechnology platforms that have achieved successful commercial deployment in the dairy sector. Specifically, GSR’s technology enables the conversion of dairy farm waste effluent into stable, high-value organic fertilizer products, thereby mitigating nutrient runoff while creating marketable outputs.

Ongoing development efforts are extending these capabilities to additional agricultural and industrial applications, with the objective of providing scalable, economically viable, and regulatorily compliant solutions for nutrient management across multiple sectors.

Leadership & Team

GSR Solutions is guided by a leadership team with deep expertise spanning biotechnology innovation, business management, operations, and market development. Collectively, our professionals are committed to advancing sustainable solutions at the intersection of food, water, and energy.

Our team’s multidisciplinary background encompasses agriculture, chemical and biological engineering, waste-to-energy technologies, environmental science, bioenergy, nutrient recovery systems, bio-based bio jet fuel or aviation fuel, anaerobic digestion for electricity, CHP, and RNG, plant and soil health, as well as marketing, sales, supply chain optimization, and strategic business development. This breadth of experience enables GSR to design and deliver commercially viable, regulatorily compliant, and ecologically impactful solutions.

Presented below are introductions to our leadership and key experts. We are also fortunate to collaborate with additional accomplished professionals and subject-matter experts whose contributions are integral to GSR’s success, though not all are listed here, they bring specialized knowledge and expertise that strengthen our ability to meet the complex challenges of nutrient management and resource recovery.

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Our Partners and Stakeholders