Sustainability is the core of MBL’s philosophy; it is why MBL was created and why it invented the seaweed biorefinery concept… and remains its driver today.
Seaweed is “fashionable”; it is often claimed to be the solution to the climate crisis and to be the food of the future. While these claims are over-hyped, there is no doubt that seaweed provides many “ecological services” in the world’s oceans and many beneficial products to society. MBL’s goal is to make these products more sustainably, based on innovative science. MBL only uses seaweeds that are sustainably available and only uses processes with low environmental impact to make products that provide societal benefits through their impact on human health and wellbeing.
MBL uses several seaweed species but specialises in Laminaria hyperborea, the dominant “brown seaweed” growing on the Atlantic fringes of Norway, Iceland, Scotland, Ireland and France. This remarkable self-regenerating “plant” (really macroalgae) needs no help – no fertiliser, no land, no cultivation (it is self-seeding); all it needs is sunlight and the nutrients present in seawater to thrive. It grows only on rocky seabed strata to which it is attached by a “holdfast” (haptera) that is often mistaken for roots; it does not grow on sand or seabed sediment.
Unaided, Laminaria hyperborea creates vast, resilient “kelp forests” just off shore, typically in depths up to 25m below sea level. It thrives in challenging conditions with Nature constantly regenerating the forest by removing and replacing the plants. Autumn and winter storms rip the (mainly larger, older) plants off their rocky substrate leaving cleaned surfaces that are quickly repopulated by embryonic new plants settling there. Around 10% of the kelp forest is “harvested” by Nature each year with much of this ripped-off kelp finishing up in storm-casts on the beaches of the North Atlantic countries.
This area has about 100 million tonnes of Laminaria hyperborea in its kelp forests; Norway accounts for 60%, Scotland 20%, Iceland 10% with the rest in France and Ireland. The Norwegian alginate industry, by far the biggest user of Laminaria hyperborea, mechanically harvests about 150,000 tonnes per year, less than 0.3% of the Norwegian forest. To put this in perspective, Nature itself “harvests” about 40 times this amount each year in Norway.
Compared to “conventional” processes for manufacturing alginate, MBL’s new process offers enormous advantages:
Milder conditions and no organic solvents
Almost 100% of the biomass is used to make multiple products
MBL's process uses less water, less energy and less chemicals than current processes