Seaweed farming in UK waters could help mitigate climate change and at the same time provide a source of food supplements and novel chemicals, scientists have told Sky News.<\/p>\n
Several thousand tonnes could be cultivated every year in the cold, clean waters around the coast, particularly in Scotland.<\/p>\n
Peter Elbourne, of Shore Seaweed, already harvests small amounts from the wild to make food products.<\/p>\n
A marine biologist by training, he has begun experimenting with seaweed farming near Oban in western Scotland to meet growing demand.<\/p>\n
“It is an extraordinary material that has a myriad of applications but has minimal environmental impact,” he said.<\/p>\n
He has laid a web of ropes with a total length of just over a kilometre, which are held just below the surface and provide a structure for the plant.<\/p>\n
He seeded them last month and by May they will be covered in a lush seaweed carpet two metres tall.<\/p>\n
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“This year I’d expect the equivalent of perhaps half a tonne of carbon dioxide to be absorbed from the ocean,” he said.<\/p>\n
“But as we scale, we will extract much more.<\/p>\n
“Seaweed grows without any fresh water, it needs no land and it needs no chemical inputs like fertilisers and pesticides.<\/p>\n
“Compare that to agriculture on land, which uses fossil fuels. So seaweed has this great potential to displace more carbon-intensive materials.”<\/p>\n
A growing number of seaweed farmers are setting up in business to meet demand from companies, such as the ‘blue-biotech’ firm Oceanium.<\/p>\n
It is extracting alternative proteins, as well as minerals and other food supplements.<\/p>\n
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But it is also using seaweed to develop environmentally-friendly bio-plastic for food trays, pots and trays.<\/p>\n
And within the next 10 to 20 years seaweed ‘bio-refineries’ could produce building blocks for industrial chemicals that are currently made from oil.<\/p>\n
Charlie Bavington, co-founder of the company, told Sky News: “Seaweed lives in a tough environment – a lot of salt, energy, and sunlight, plus you have warm habitats and cold habitats.<\/p>\n
“It has solved a lot of chemical and physical problems to survive, and that creates the diversity of chemistry we can use and develop to solve our problems.”<\/p>\n
He hopes that in future so much could be extracted from seaweed that just 5% would be left over as waste.<\/p>\n
Oceanium currently processes 150 tonnes of seaweed a year but plans to scale up to 200,000 tonnes by 2030.<\/p>\n
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“Seaweed is the ultimate sustainable material,” said Dr Bavington.<\/p>\n
“It trumps almost everything else.<\/p>\n
“It also provides economic opportunities for coastal communities.”<\/p>\n
Globally 30 million tonnes of seaweed are cultivated, almost all in Asia. The market is growing by 8% a year.<\/p>\n
The Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) has just been given \u00a3407,000 by the government to set up a ‘seaweed academy’ to advise farmers and start-ups.<\/p>\n
Prof Michele Stanley, Associate Director for Science, Enterprise and Innovation, said: “I don’t think until recently we appreciated the marine environment and the role things like seaweed play.<\/p>\n
“<\/strong>There is only so much land you can plant trees on.<\/p>\n “We have to look more broadly if we are going to reach net-zero.<\/strong>“<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Seaweed is being used to develop environmentally-friendly bio-plastic and within the next few decades, seaweed ‘bio-refineries’ could produce building blocks for industrial chemicals that are currently made from oil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":128,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev-econyq.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev-econyq.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev-econyq.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev-econyq.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev-econyq.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/dev-econyq.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130,"href":"http:\/\/dev-econyq.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions\/130"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev-econyq.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev-econyq.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev-econyq.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev-econyq.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}