At Seaweed Generation, we believe that nature and technology can be brought together to create a more sustainable and equitable future for all. Our first step is Sargassum, we are working with it to assess the potential for permanent large scale carbon dioxide removal with seaweed. It’s a blight on coastal areas, and causes untold devastation when it clusters densely on beaches. Past the point of bringing Sargassum under control, we will need to scale with cultivation.
There are a lot of things that we need to put in place in order to do this and, whilst we have a great team who are super knowledgeable in their areas of expertise, we also recognise that there is a lot of learning that we need to do.
The best way to learn is to do. Which is why we’ve been quietly working behind the scenes on our cultivation experience and expertise. It’s early days, but we are already working on growing infrastructure that can be seeded, harvested and managed by robotic infrastructure. It’s the only way to ensure that our process is sustainable and scalable.
With that in mind, we’ve been working with some of the best growers in the UK and are really pleased with our progress so far: this year in 2022 we harvested our first crop of 2 tonnes, in collaboration with Eat Seaweed.
Our ultimate goal is to scale this process for large scale industrial use cases (that replace high emissions industries) and long term carbon sequestration; our proud first baby step, generating this relatively teeny tiny amount from our first proper growing season, is far too valuable (and expensive) for this. So you’ll be pleased to hear it’s gone to a good home and is being consumed in some of the World’s finest Michelin starred restaurants!
As we refine, develop and scale the cultivation rig and adapt it for deployment worldwide, we aim to increase cultivation capacity and promote the use of seaweeds as a source of material in a plethora of uses (alongside foods, feeds and dietary supplements) in niche markets like cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, maybe even to make bioplastics or commodity chemicals.
There’s plenty of interest in these markets, and for them to be sustainable at scale, many will need to move from wild harvest to cultivated biomass. We love seaweed and want to see it utilised in as many beneficial ways as possible!
Our mission is to unlock more use cases for seaweed, by bringing down the costs of cultivation, allowing many seaweed industries to develop and scale, without damaging natural habitats.