Dominican proposals for use of sargassum were included in the beneficiaries of the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) funding through the IDB lab. The selected proposals come from Barbados, Belize, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Mexico, and Trinidad and Tobago.
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and its innovation laboratory, IDB Lab, announced the results of their Sargassum Innovation Quest: Building Resilient Coastal Ecosystems. The initiative was launched to identify and support solutions that leverage advanced technologies and innovative practices to harness the potential of sargassum biomass and enhance the resilience of coastal communities in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The effort, developed in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is a response to the challenges faced by the region due to the increasing influx of sargassum, which has been progressively affecting tourism, fishing, and coastal ecosystems since 2011.
The selected projects aim to harness the potential of sargassum as a resource for various industries and mitigate the environmental and economic impact of sargassum influx in the most sensitive geographic regions. The initiatives eligible for financial support in the Dominican Republic are:
• SOS Carbon: This project proposes efficient and sustainable sargassum collection using the Littoral Collection Module (LCM), a patented system that converts local vessels into high capacity sargassum collectors. It also includes transforming sargassum into biostimulants for crops, developing products under research such as animal feed and cosmetics, and incorporating a carbon offset mechanism.
• Origin by Ocean: This proposal aims to extract multiple valuable chemicals for various industries and produce arsenic-free animal feed from sargassum and other invasive brown seaweeds, all in a single process using a patented biorefinery system.
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IDB
16 January 2025