Seaweed forests have become a much-plumbed well for anyone seeking solutions to some of the world’s biggest environmental problems. Companies with a climate-conscious bent are using seaweed instead of petroleum-derived materials to make products like sustainable shopping bags and furniture. Growing more seaweed forests has been hailed as a way to sequester carbon, while harvested seaweed is being put into livestock feed in an effort to cure methane-laden cow burps.
Now, a company called Marine Biologics wants to catch a ride on the seaweed wave by whipping these oceanic greens into a fermented slurry. The startup’s goal is to eventually collect millions of pounds of seaweed, liquefy and preserve it, then analyze that congealed goo and separate it into its base components. From there, the minerals, proteins, or carbohydrates can be broken down, extracted, and used for a host of consumer applications.
The first place that goo will be going is into your food, as emulsifiers used in many types of food production. Then, maybe other products like cosmetics and anything made with plastic. First, the company just wants to collect all that sweet, sweet seaweed data.
Marine Biologics CEO Patrick Griffin comes from a past life in finance and cryptocurrency—he was the first employee at the blockchain company Ripple. But his time working directly in the crypto world came to an abrupt end after a horrific surfing accident.
Walloped by a wave in the ocean, Griffin’s surfboard hit him in the face while he floated in the water and punctured his left eyeball, which then had to be removed. It was a traumatic experience that he says left him with a very different perspective on life and sense of priorities. “I really embarked on a journey in thinking about, OK, what’s the next chapter going to be?” Griffin says.
Ultimately, the experience prompted him to leave behind blockchain and crypto, industries which also happen to be very climate unfriendly and have massive carbon footprints. He left Ripple and started his own company with an aquatic moniker.
“It’s a little bit of a cliché,” he admits. “You make your bones in crypto and then you launch a climate technology company.”
Ironically, the accident got him excited about the ocean again. He saw a gap in the climate resiliency market in the form of fundamental building materials. Even if all the world’s other ongoing climate resiliency efforts worked—vehicle electrification, renewable energy investments—products are still often built on a foundation of plastics or other oil-based materials.
“The chemicals and materials that we use today are all by and large built on petroleum,” Griffin says. “It is the last piece of the puzzle that you’re really going to have to chip away at to make a big impact.”
He figured seaweed—or macroalgae, as any one of the thousands of species of multicellular ocean plants are classified—could be a way to do that. Compared to terrestrial vegetation, seaweed grows fast (sometimes too fast) and has rich but widely variable chemical composites. To be able to rely on a consistent source of the different chemical components that can be found in seaweed, you would first need to have a way to collect data about the plants themselves.
“If people better understood the chemicals of seaweed, maybe we could better understand the markets that could handle them,” says the company’s chief science officer, Spencer Serin. “And that’s going to rely on standardized testing strategies for seaweed that need to be very open and transparent and done at a high level.”
