Got a smart way to recycle seaweed? Miami-Dade wants to bankroll innovative ideas
Those brown globs of rotten-egg-smelling sargassum may be taking a fortunate hiatus from sliming South Florida beaches but the seaweed will be back — if not this summer, then the one after, and so on.
Next time, Miami-Dade wants to turn all that excess seaweed into an entrepreneurial windfall. How? Well, that’s still an unanswered and potentially valuable question.
Can we eat it? Feed it to critters? Burn it for energy? Use it in beauty products? The county, with backing from donors, is dangling big checks to companies that can bring the best ideas for how to put the abundant resource to use.
The Miami-Dade Innovation Authority (MDIA), a nonprofit that connects local government to private technology companies, will pay $100,000 to three startups that can come up with environmentally friendly ways to get rid of all the seaweed that annually piles up on South Florida’s shores. They hope the challenge, open to companies around the globe, will create more jobs and contribute to the local economy.
“We’re looking for these really great entrepreneurs and innovators that are not only focused on the circular economy but saying, how can we create value out of something that would otherwise be disposed of,” said Leigh-Ann Buchanan, president and chief executive officer of MDIA.
“Miami wins when startups grow and start their business here,” she said.
Currently, sargassum is scraped from beaches by heavy equipment and trucked to a Miami-Dade facility to dry and shrink before going to the landfill. The odor and unsightly piles hurt the tourism industry and cleaning it up is also expensive for taxpayers, costing the county $4.2 million in 2022 alone, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said.
“The [project’s] primary purpose is ecological,” Levine Cava told the Miami Herald. “Not filling up the landfills with a product that ideally doesn’t need to go in the landfill. It’s not garbage. It’s not waste. It’s organic, and we hope there will be other uses for it.”
The seaweed challenge is the first in a series of three that MDIA will present this year with aims at helping solve some of Miami’s most challenging problems like climate change, affordable housing, health care and transit. The plans will be supported by $3 million from Miami-Dade, $3 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and $3 million from Ken Griffin, the CEO of Citadel, a hedge-fund. The goal is to distribute $1 million of equity investment to startups annually to help companies defray the costs of testing and validating their solutions.
READ MORE: Levine Cava reveals new innovation fund while touting her record as county mayor
The Nature Conservancy, a global conservation organization, will advise and evaluate the candidates, which will be announced in December 2023. The products will be tested in the Spring 2024 sargassum season alongside Miami-Dade County and its partnering organizations.
Scientists believe the warming waters from climate change are to blame for giving the sargassum a hospitable place to prosper.
“Increasing sargassum blooms are attributable to many factors, including changes in ocean currents, extreme weather, and warming waters associated with climate change,” said Morgan Higman, the Florida climate strategy director at The Nature Conservancy.
There are challenges to the seaweed challenge. For one, the are some health concerns complicate handling and re-purposing the stuff, which researchers have found contain heavy metals. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection is still in the process of creating safety guidelines to compost sargassum while avoiding it leaking into the groundwater and drinking water. Leaving it on the beaches is unsafe too because the build up releases hydrogen sulfide gas that irritates the eyes, nose and throat.
Miami isn’t the only place that has tried to turn seaweed trash into treasure. For example, in Jamaica one company used sargassum as fertilizer, but the heavy metals makes it dangerous to feed to plants so they switched to using it as biofuel. Carbonwave, headquartered in Puerto Rico, is developing a biostimulant from sargassum to protect plants from heat and excess water, which could be an asset for climate change.
“We think sargassum is an issue that makes sense to focus on because we’ve seen other innovative startups working in the Caribbean but we do not yet have those start ups in Miami,” Buchanan said. “It presents a unique opportunity for the Innovation Authority to use its models to attract those types of solutions to our market.”
Last week scientists said an expected massive sargassum season was over in South Florida, possibly because early forming tropical storms may have broken up much of the mass in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea.
READ MORE: ‘The sargassum season for Florida is gone’: Mysterious seaweed disappearances continue
The MDIA program was modeled after the Israel Innovation Authority, which was able to leverage between the public and private sector to address issues that impact the quality of life in Israel.
The deadline to submit proposals is Friday, September 29, 2023. To enter, visit https://apply.mdia.miami/.
This climate report is funded by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald retains editorial control of all content.
This story was originally published July 12, 2023 at 5:30 AM.
