Why this startup wants to help build a seaweed industry in Alaska

In an underwater farm off the coast of Alaska, seaweed is quickly growing as it dangles from long floating lines. Within weeks, the kelp — which was planted last fall — will be harvested. Then it will be sold to Macro Oceans, a startup that will convert it into the building blocks for products like biodegradable packaging.

The seaweed industry is nascent in the U.S.; most seaweed farms are in Asia, where the majority of the crop is used for food. In Maine, a startup is building a market for kelp to help fishermen find a new source of income as climate change disrupts the lobster industry. Macro Oceans, which just raised a round of seed funding, wants to help kick-start the industry in Alaska — and use the seaweed to start replacing petrochemicals and compounds that normally come from industrially farmed crops like corn.

Founder and CEO Matthew Perkins previously worked on seed genetics in traditional agriculture. “I spent a decade or so in that industry, and had seen the enormous impact modern agriculture has on our planet,” he says. “Both the impact on ecosystems, and also the carbon impact that we have from growing all these crops that use fossil fuels to make synthetic fertilizer.”

Seaweed grows using only sunlight and seawater, avoiding irrigation, fertilizer, or cutting down forests to clear land for farming. And as it grows, it quickly sucks up carbon. Globally, wild seaweed sequesters around 200 million metric tons of CO2 a year. The potential as a climate solution has sparked other startups. One, called Running Tide, plans to grow kelp and then sink it to the ocean floor, storing the carbon. Others, like Macro Oceans and Carbonwave, another startup that just announced funding, want to turn it into products. (The Bezos Earth Fund, the climate philanthropy launched by Jeff Bezos, has also given $10 million in grants to help grow seaweed farming.)

Perkins was struck by the fact that the composition of kelp — the split between carbohydrates, protein, and fat — was similar to corn, which is used to make a wide variety of products, from animal feed to fuel and bioplastics. “I thought, oh, this is pretty interesting,” he says. “It stands to reason if corn is used everywhere, why shouldn’t sugar kelp be used everywhere? It’s essentially a much lower-impact version of the same thing.”

Bioplastic made from corn, called PLA, doesn’t break down easily. “The dirty secret is that it’s not really biodegradable and compostable unless you take it to an industrial composting facility,” Perkins says. “Most of it ends up in landfill.”

By contrast, plastic made from seaweed can biodegrade quickly. And while solving the plastic problem will also involve using much less plastic, seaweed-based plastic could be a viable replacement for some applications.

Sway, one company that Macro Oceans is working with, is making a seaweed-based version of unrecyclable thin film plastic.

“Beyond plastics, where we get most excited is using these kelp-based building blocks to decarbonize finished industrial products like textiles, polymers, surfactants, pesticides, fertilizers, dyes, and gels that are overwhelmingly fossil-based today,” says Alex Laplaza, a partner at Lowercarbon Capital, one of Macro Ocean’s investors.

Startups like Solugen, which is making plant-based versions of chemicals that are normally made from fossil fuels, could potentially use kelp as a low-carbon feedstock. Macro Oceans is making some other products that are unique to kelp, including compounds that can be added to cosmetics to add a moisturizing effect.

In Alaska, the type of seaweed that Macro Oceans uses is harvested once a year and typically has to go through an energy-intensive process of drying or freezing after harvest. Macro Oceans developed a method to store it wet for up to a year. Then it breaks down the wet seaweed into different biomaterials. At a pilot “biorefinery” in California, it has started small-scale production.

“We use the entire plant,” Perkins says. “We don’t leave anything behind. And the reason that that’s important is because you can then obviously get more dollars per pound of seaweed, which makes our unit economics work and also gives us a lower environmental footprint.” The ingredients that it produces — which could eventually include things like dextrose, acetic acid, ethanol, and ethylene — will initially be more expensive, he says, but will get cheaper as the company scales up.

It will soon build a bigger biorefinery, and then a facility in Alaska so it can work locally. Kelp production is in the early stages there as a small group of fishermen begin to try it.

“The fishery that I’ve been involved in is kind of struggling, so I saw it as a way to potentially have a little bit more of a steady income,” says Alf Pryor, a fisherman who started a kelp farm in Kodiak, Alaska. There has been a steep learning curve, he says. And there isn’t a large market it for it yet, though Macro Oceans wants to change that. (Right now, the small amount of kelp that’s produced is sold for food.)

Others in the fishing industry are interested in getting involved when it’s clear that there’s demand, Pryor says.

Kelp farms could also potentially make fisheries healthier; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has installed cameras in the kelp farms to study how they might help fish populations grow.

Macro Oceans plans to later move to other locations both in the U.S. and beyond to work with different species of seaweed.

“Our vision is obviously not to re-create the monocultures of crops that we have on land,” Perkins says. “We see this much more as being a local solution where people are growing lots of different, locally appropriate species. And we’ll be figuring out how to process them and turn them into things that are unique for customers.”

READ SOURCE