That smelly, nasty brown seaweed that ruined your last Caribbean vacation? Might be amazing in skin care, hair products, and makeup.
That’s the word from two Finnish companies planning to extract valuable ingredients from sargassum. The destructive, rapidly growing seaweed has invaded 43 countries so far, washing ashore in thick mats and causing billions of dollars in damage to infrastructure, fisheries, coral reefs, wildlife, and tourism.
The biotech company Origin by Ocean has partnered with chemical manufacturer The CABB Group to establish a first-of-its-kind biorefinery in Finland to extract high-value materials from sargassum.
Among them: alginate, a versatile polysaccharide that’s found to be an excellent thickening agent and bubble stabilizer in shampoos and soaps. It has hydrating and firming benefits for skin and hair and is also used in creams, gels, and masks.
Another polysaccharide found in sargassum — fucoidan — is an active ingredient in a multitude of face and body products. It's valued for its ability to lock in hydration, its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties, and the way it stimulates the skin’s natural production of collagen and hyaluronic acid.
Other extracts from the odorous algae can be used in a multitude of consumer products to replace fossil-based chemicals, Origin by Ocean says in announcing the new biorefinery. It is set to begin operating in 2028.
“Origin by Ocean intends to turn the environmental disaster into a solution for the chemical industry,” says the company, adding that it is seeking partnerships to duplicate its sargassum processing facilities worldwide.
“We are already planning for additional biorefineries in the Caribbean, closer to the sargassum blooms,” says Origin by Ocean founder and chemist Mari Granström. She became aware while scuba diving of the damage sargassum causes to marine ecosystems.
The brown algae that smells of rotten eggs hasn't always posed a problem. Before 2011, it was contained in a north Atlantic patch of ocean called the Sargasso Sea, where it serves as a nutrient-rich habitat for marine life.
Sargassum became an issue starting in 2011. That’s when strong ocean currents from a rare climactic event at that time, called the North Atlantic Oscillation, swept the algae much farther south than ever before, say scientists at the French oceanographic research institute LEGOS.
The warmer tropical waters, plus agricultural fertilizer runoff from the Amazon and other rivers, created ideal conditions for sargassum to bloom out of control. Before long, it began clogging up shorelines in the southern U.S., Brazil, the Caribbean, and western Europe and Africa in a steadily growing zone known as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt.
Origin by Ocean says its new biorefinery will solve two problems. One, it will turn the invasive algae into a profitable resource; and two, it will provide a bio-based alternative to fossil-based chemicals currently used in plastic items, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, detergents, and soaps.
“Our fossil-based world is broken," Granström says. "For change to be possible at a large scale, we need to reimagine the value chains of the products that we use every day."