Photo courtesy of Carbonwave. Retrieved from news.mongabay.com
In 2015, smelly mats of a brown macroalgae called sargassum piled as high as 1.2 meter (4 feet) on the beaches of Barbados, recalls Joshua Forte. It was the fourth year in what has become an annual nightmare, with an estimated 18,100 kilograms (20 tons) of seaweed inundating Caribbean shorelines each year and wrecking the region’s tourism-centered economies.
The onslaught of seaweed reeked of rotten eggs, but Forte smelled something else: opportunity.
A year earlier, Forte founded an organic fertilizer company called Red Diamond Compost. He was already selling a soil additive from sunflower seeds called Liquid Sunshine. But the sargassum seemed too big to ignore.