How Seaweed Impacts Our Environment

Algae is our planet’s wholly sustainable resource. Growing in abundance on ocean beds around the world, it requires zero inputs, removes carbon from the surrounding waters and returns oxygen to the marine ecosystem.

Our research at Selkies House

From day one we have sought to initiate cross-industry conversations with seaweed harvesters, bioengineers, paper manufacturers and book production directors here and in the US to understand the potential of seaweed paper for the publishing industry. We have tried to establish our best-case technology scenario today, and what the steps might be towards our goal of printing books on paper that might be worthy of the environmental themes we support.

Problems, Questions and Solutions

 1. Not all seaweed is ethically harvested—the sea floor is dredged in large scale collection.

 2. Investment in seaweed as an industrial and sustainable resource has grown extremely fast since 2021. Startups have looked first to the fast-food industry or to the fashion industry for their customer base and have overlooked the multi-billion-pound global publishing industry.

 3. If biodegradable papers are possible today from seaweed, what is required to create paper for our books that will last? Interesting developments have been made with red seaweed in Malaysia, but the problem remains its opacity.

 4. Scale becomes a problem—it takes “x” amount of seaweed to create “x” amount of paper.

 5. What are the chemicals used in the process of breaking down the cellulose in seaweed? What is their impact on the environment?

 6. What research and development are existing paper manufacturers conducting into seaweed? Who will help us in our goal to do better than recycle and enable existing channels of over-consumption?

 7. What is the cost to existing paper manufacturers of upgrading their machinery to work with seaweed rather than cotton or wood fibres?

 8. What and where are the grant-giving opportunities for publishers and manufacturers?

 Assuming we can overcome these hurdles, what is the roll-out for including wholly sustainable seaweed paper in our books?

We can test in three phases:

Bookmarks — our beautiful bookmarks are available at bookshops around the country and demonstrate the existing seaweed paper technology.

Endpapers — we can print our endpapers from the next stage of seaweed paper technology.

Book pages — when we are certain that the paper technology is ready and our books will not biodegrade, we can produce books whose pages are made from wholly sustainable paper.

Our authors and translators have been early supporters of our environmental ambitions and we hope you will want to engage with us and join the drive for change.

Resources

 Planting Trees Doesn’t Always Help with Climate Change — BBC, 2020

 Paper Innovation — James Cropper, Kendal, UK

 How Kelp Naturally Combats Climate Change — Harvard University, USA, 2019

 Seaweed, A Potential Climate Change Solution — Harvard University, USA, 2022

 Making Paper from Seaweed — University of Malaya, Malaysia, 2023

 Disappearing Packaging — Notpla, London

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