By Riley Kaminer
Sargassum isn’t just a threat to your fun day at the beach. Rather, the invasion of this seaweed puts lives and livelihoods at risk. We’ve already seen the negative effects of sargassum in the Caribbean – from toxic gasses, smelly tap water, job losses, and much more– as these communities have been hit early and hit hard. But anyone who has spent some time on one of South Florida’s beaches knows that we are easily in the firing line.
That’s exactly why the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority (MDIA) created a public innovation challenge to help us combat the sargassum onslaught – and perhaps even put it to productive use.
When Homestead-based Raquel de Antonio [pictured below] heard about this challenge, she immediately called her father, Andrés, a mechanical engineer.
While attending a wedding in Tulum around five years ago, the duo suffered from the rampant sargassum. “That day, I remember him walking around and being very curious about the sargassum,” de Antonio told Refresh Miami. “He’s passionate about inventions and about environmental sustainability,” she explained, noting that he took some sargassum samples.
On the phone, de Antonio asked her dad if anything had come of his sargassum experiments. Turns out that it had: With this material, he had developed some material using a machine he had developed for a composites company.
A marketing mind and entrepreneur at heart, de Antonio decided to figure out how to commercialize this product, launching Sargassum Eco Lumber last year.
While the father-daughter duo (with help from de Antonio’s MIT structural engineer brother) did not ultimately win the MDIA challenge, it did give them the push needed to start working on this project full-time. It also put them on the map for Seaworthy Collective, the Miami-based BlueTech entrepreneur support organization and community, ultimately enabling Sargassum Eco Lumber to join a recent cohort.
Sargassum Eco Lumber has developed a new sustainable building material. The company is using a 40/60 mixture of sargassum seaweed and recycled plastics (also alleviating our plastic pollution crisis) to create a high-quality, eco-friendly lumber. The lumber is also durable and resistant to moisture, decay, and pests, making it a good choice for a variety of construction needs.
Sargassum Eco Lumber’s product could help to clean up the sargassum from our oceans and shores. And in the unlikely event that we ever run out of sargassum, de Antonio asserts that other materials such as pistachio shells or rice husks could be used in its place.
Your creativity is the only limit for the use cases of this lumber: everything from decking and roofing to furniture and pallets and beyond. The company has already developed a prototype and is seeking $3.5 million to construct the proprietary machinery to make this dream come to life: a dryer for the sargassum and a 3,000-ton press. In the context where governments are spending millions each year to fight sargassum, de Antonio hopes that investors will see a large market and imminent need.
“We’re not just environmentally sustainable – we’re also commercially sustainable,” she asserted. “It’s my vision to have a business that my children can continue,” all while building a better world for them as well.
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
- Seaworthy Collective launches its fourth BlueTech cohort. Let’s meet them.
- Planet ReFi seeks to make Messi mania and fútbol a force for environmental good
- Catching up with environmental reporting startup SustainaBase: ‘Companies of all sizes are starting to really care about this issue’
- Fresh off Fulbright, Miami native Patricia Garcia preps return home to expand Unithrifts
- Kind Designs raises $5M in seed funding to deploy 3D-printed seawalls
- 1Print is commercializing the technology that could 3D concrete print us out of our climate woes
