Joel Weber

Joel Weber is the founder of Lakewater Nutrient Capture Ltd. (LWNC), a Winnipeg-based cleantech company offering a unique phosphorus removal service using absorbent materials to address the large eutrophic lakes that conventional treatment approaches have failed to reach.

Joel's path to water remediation is anything but conventional. He grew up on a family acreage in Manitoba, where practical problem-solving was a way of life from an early age. He went on to join a consulting engineering firm, rising from junior technician to head of the CAD department and developing a broad working knowledge across civil and architectural engineering disciplines. He became the person organizations called when complex, difficult projects had gone sideways — a reputation built on unconventional thinking and relentless follow-through. He later built a large-scale hay farming operation from the ground up with national and international sales, before pivoting to build an indoor farming business supplying fresh herbs and microgreens to Winnipeg restaurants and retailers — designing and constructing every aspect of both operations himself.

That combination of engineering, agriculture, and entrepreneurship gives Joel a distinctive lens on the phosphorus pollution problem: he approaches it not as a compliance exercise, but as a systems challenge demanding an elegantly simple solution. His guiding philosophy is rooted in the KISS principle — strip the problem to its fundamentals, resist unnecessary complexity, and build something that actually works in the field rather than only on paper. Applied to freshwater remediation, that philosophy produced a system defined by what it doesn't do: it adds nothing to the lake, deposits nothing on the sediment, and relies on no chemistry in the water column. It simply moves across the surface, captures phosphorus, and takes it away permanently — recovering it as a premium agricultural product in the process.