Seaweed from Beaches can Power Hotels

Brown seaweed

Brown seaweed is a grave concern for an economy that relies on tourism and the Caribbean’s famously clear waters.

Naama Barak writes in Israel21c.org about businessman and entrepreneur Ygdal Ach. While he was beginning a vacation with his family in the Dominican Republic, they came across a disturbing sight — huge amounts of smelly brown seaweed scattered all over the shoreline they were hoping to enjoy.

Mr. Ach is the founder and CEO of Y.A. Maof, an Israeli company that works on environmental and waste disposal projects. “We were all very disappointed with the situation and I tried to understand what was going on there,” he says.

As such, when he went out on his morning run, he asked the resort employees who were busy shoveling the seaweed off the beach what they do with it. He was aghast to learn that the seaweed was being taken to a local dumpster where it was left to dry before being burned. So, he decided to investigate the situation further. “I took a bag and filled it with seaweed and I brought it back to Israel to some test labs.”

Biogas from algae

Mr. Ach and his team concluded that combining the algae with organic waste in a biogas facility could enable energy generation.

He recruited a resorts hospitality corporation and an energy group to set up an experimental project. Recognizing it also as an educational and community engagement opportunity, he engaged Scholas and Pope Francis’ international educational initiative to accompany the project.

Currently, the project is in financial review and Mr. Ach estimates that the biogas facility will be ready in two years’ time.

The plan is to collect the brown algae and transport it to the facility, where it will be combined with organic home waste. The methane gas created in the biogas facility will be transported to a biological generator and from there to the power grid, where it will serve the local hotel industry.

Impact investing

“The whole concept that we’ve created here is building a platform for impact investing,” Mr. Ach explains. “It’s a chain that begins with collecting seaweed and ends with three products: electricity, compost and fertilizer.”

All rights reserved. Permission required to reprint articles in their entirety. Must include copyright statement and live hyperlinks. Contact editorial@algaeplanet.com. Algae Planet accepts unsolicited manuscripts for consideration, and takes no responsibility for the validity of claims made in submitted editorial.

Seagriculture EU 2024
AlgaeMetrics

Subscribe

EABA AlgaeEurope23
Hire Robin Coles Technical Writer

Breaking-News

  • November 27, 2023: Australia’s first high-level organization to serve the commercial seaweed industry officially launched in Canberra on November 16, 2023. The Australian Sustainable Seaweed Alliance (ASSA) represents ten corporate members across six states and was launched to advance environmentally responsible farming and production, strategic research and development, and scientific and biotech-related commercialization. READ MORE...
  • November 20, 2023: A research team from IIT Gandhinagar, a leading technical institution in India, has found that beads made from a combination of sea algae, salt, and nanoparticles can be used to remove dyes from wastewater pollution created in the dye and chemical industries. READ MORE...
  • November 17, 2023: Isis Central Sugar Mill, 300km north of Brisbane, Australia, will soon be home to ponds growing algae fed by the mill’s wastewater. The mill will harvest the carbon dioxide created when they burn fiber left over from crushing cane to make electricity and use the nutrients in the wastewater to feed the algae, which is intended for food and fuel. READ MORE...

A Beginner’s Guide