Leaders in Stormwater: TJ MULLEN

This month, SMC’s LEADER IN STORMWATER is the Co-Founder of a company that has helped customers meet their water quality goals for more than 20 years - TJ Mullen, President of Best Management Products, Inc. (BMP, Inc.)

With a background in engineering and a love for water, TJ founded BMP, Inc. with colleague Lee Duran - a brilliant designer, noted architect, contractor and artist with an eye for efficient design who passed away several years ago - inspiring TJ to use this approach as the core of the firm’s product design and business ethic to this day. TJ’s mission focuses on helping people - mainly engineers and designers - solve water quality problems with the most simple and cost-effective strategies. 

TJ says, “Every time [people] build or farm on the land, it’s our responsibility to improve water quality whenever our activities touch or create stormwater runoff. If our industry can offer affordable solutions allowing us all to live by the maxim of ‘leaving it better than we found it’, we will reverse the tide of the degradation of our surface and subsurface water resources”. The impact of BMP, Inc.’s work is measurable, and it can make a dramatic difference for trash capture as well as reducing gross-solids, sediment and hydrocarbons—all highly visible pollutants. 

TJ provides an example of the effects of BMP, Inc.’s important work. He says, “[Our] products have been installed in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for 15 years. In one year alone, the City’s municipal engineering firm reported several hundred structures [equipped] with our devices [have] captured 500,000+ pounds of trash and other solids. When I think of a half million pounds of pollution NOT being in the water, it’s really gratifying. And that’s just one city - we have 100,000+ installations around the world - and it’s making a huge difference.” TJ says this field brings an opportunity to have a real impact on the planet, and that he is always thinking of ways to either solve evolving water quality problems or improve existing designs. And while BMP, Inc. is focused on the built environment and underground infrastructure, he says that the best solutions happen when clever designs marry both infrastructure and natural systems. 

TJ has the Chesapeake Bay woven throughout his life, both professionally and on a personal level. He was a chair on the founding board of Blue Water Baltimore, an organization that brought together 5 watershed and water advocacy groups in 2010 and continues to grow and thrive to protect and promote Baltimore’s amazing water resources; and home to the Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper (also founded by TJ). TJ continues to support their efforts, and that of the Waterkeeper Alliance and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. TJ lives on a direct tributary of the Chesapeake Bay, and enjoys spending as much time on the water as possible - boating, fishing, paddling, crabbing, bird/critter watching and enjoying the water with his family and their dogs.