Welcome to 100 Climate Conversations. Thank you so much for joining us. I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands upon which we are recording today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We respect their Elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country. Today is number 86 of 100 conversations happening every Friday. Now, the series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. We are recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse Museum. And before it was the museum, this space was the Ultimo Power Station. It was built in 1899 and supplied coal-powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system then that went through into the 1960s. In the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus away from that coal-powered past forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution. My name’s Nate Byrne. I’m the weather presenter on ABC News Breakfast. I’m a meteorologist, oceanographer, science communicator. So, Dr Pia Winberg, here is a passionate advocate for the further development of sustainable seaweed cultivation systems in Australia. A marine ecologist-turned-entrepreneur, she brings 20 years of industry and academic experience to her position as founder and chief executive of Venus Shell Systems and PhycoHealth. Yes we are lucky to have you with us today. Please join me in making Pia feel very welcome. I’m particularly excited about having a chat with you here because I think there’s something that happens under the ocean that a lot of us don’t know about. It’s something you don’t see very much of. Because that’s the case, I wonder what the heck got you so interested in seaweed?

Well, it just makes sense. And all roads lead to what makes sense, we hope. And it wasn’t seaweed, I didn’t wake up saying I want to be a seaweed farmer. That was not on my radar. It’s just that this makes sense. And that’s what’s led me there. So, my background is as a marine systems ecologist. Like, I just had a passion, and I love the oceans. And it’s, well it’s Stockholm University. That was what drove me to do research in marine systems and marine systems ecology led me to like, ‘Wow, the oceans are driving the planet’. I mean, it’s a cliché now. We know that 70% of the planet is ocean. It is driving our planet. We all know now about the ocean temperature systems that are creating climate, rain and everything. I mean, you’re a meteorologist. That’s your area. But the oceans are the driver. And so, it’s not just the temperature and things, but it’s also the whole nutrient cycle, the water cycle, the carbon dioxide cycle. And through that marine systems ecology background, I got the opportunity to realise, well, we’re really stuffing up some of these flows around the planet. And one of those flows and issues was coming from some of the large-scale developments of aquaculture. I mean just society, in general, but aquaculture was a theme linked to the marine environment and back in the late 1990s, the blue revolution was happening, aquaculture was being promoted by the World Bank and it’s this is the solution for developing countries — we all grow our food in the oceans and they will have money and jobs and we will have food. But you have to understand the ecosystem that supports an industry when you’re going into it. You can’t just look at it in a silo, which is what we tend to do in society. And so, in the end, the World Bank, with good intentions, is investing in developing nations in aquaculture. And I got the opportunity to go to Sri Lanka, where the consequences of doing it without thinking about the environment and the ecological services that support it have a really bad outcome in that you’re actually polluting the estuarine system that is supporting the industry from the beginning. And if you don’t create a circular system of your flows, it will fall over. And so, the prawn farming industry was one victim of it, where diseases and pollution — it’s like climbing your toilet to the kitchen sink is basically what they’re doing and bringing back, you know, urea and pathogens into the system. And so, the prawns die, and you shoot yourself in the foot and the industry’s over. The salmon industry has done a similar thing in Chile where it was like it became such a big opportunity for the economy of Chile in the salmon industry, but they didn’t calculate the ecosystem services that supported it, and so that industry fell over. So, what does support that ecosystem for animals in the ocean? It’s a cycle of nutrients going back and being digested back by bacteria and funguses and the nutrients are released and they’re put into seaweed, which creates the oxygen and balances the system again. And so, I got the opportunity to go to Sri Lanka and look at a tiger prawn farm system that was closed to the outside environment. And it could actually recirculate and operate as an ecosystem on its own for the full grow out cycle. That tiger prawn system let its wastewater go into big sedimentation ponds that had milkfish and tilapia that fed the locals. It then went to a pond of mussels that took out the small particles in the system, and then the final dissolved particles and carbon dioxide was taken up by seaweeds. And seaweeds could then recirculate the nutrient-depleted oxygen-rich water and buffered water back into the prawns. And we start the cycle again. And that’s how nature does it. And that’s how the tiger prawn farm in Sri Lanka successfully did it and how we should be doing aquaculture. And so, it’s just about a respect for the ecosystem services. And one of the things that we really forgot about was seaweed and the ecosystem services it provides. So, that’s why I do seaweed.

What is a seaweed, like, biologically speaking?

Ah, seaweed is an algae. It’s just a multicellular algae, a more advanced form of algae, I guess, if you want to put it that way. But, you know, seaweed’s been around for a billion years of evolution. That It was one of the first organisms. But seaweeds have evolved with bacteria, with fungus. And what is a seaweed? What is a fungus? What is a bacteria? What are– actually back then, they all started cooperating and working together. So, it was like algae and fungus. They were the first things that said, why don’t we partner and move up on land? The fungus, we can get minerals out of the rocks pretty easily and you can catch the energy from the sun and we’ll put our forces together and we’ll become one. And that is a lichen. So, a lichen is a mixture of seaweed and fungus. And the same thing is certain, like the nori that we eat in the seaweed nori, is actually sort of a fusion of life that is algae and bacteria. So, what is seaweed? It’s a life form that was created and it’s predominantly algae, but it does have very close and essential relationships with bacteria and fungus. And we’re only just starting to understand how connected we are and all of life around us is. But effectively, seaweed is an algae, if you like, and if you want to simplify it further, there’s three types. There’s brown, which we might know more commonly as kelp; red seaweeds, which nori — even though it looks a bit green and brown, is a red seaweed; and then there’s green seaweed, which I predominantly work with, and it is the algae that was the precursor to all plants on land.

You’re obviously doing work with seaweed, but people have been using seaweed for a very long time. Can you give us a potted history of seaweed and people?

Yes, people have been using seaweed from the beginning. The peopling of the South Americas, for example, there’s seaweed middens in South America that are 14,000 years old inland, showing that people were walking purposefully carrying seaweed with them because it was such an essential part of the nutrition and our ability to dry it and walk with it meant that we could bring essential nutrients with us. Things like iodine, iron are essential. And then the Māori battalion went to the Second World War. I think they were the only non-constipated part of the Second World War because they had karengo in their satchels. Karengo is their word for the nori that we know in our sushi today. And even here in Australia, of course, First Nations people, you know, the Aunties and where I am in local Jervis Bay. I’m having to do scientific research to prove the point of seaweed and health benefits. But they go, oh, yes, that green seaweed is good for your gut. So, it’s a bit ironic that we have to pretend that we’re doing all this sophisticated frontier research when it’s one of the oldest foods on the planet. Vikings ate it, the Irish ate it, everybody ate it. And so the modern food system just took it off the menu. So, we’ve got to put it back.

Right. Okay. So, we’ve had lots of ways of using seaweed in the past. How does it look now? What are the applications for seaweed that exist today and also that you’re exploring?

Well, in our modern world, you know, we can just go back to putting it in our diet the way we did. But in our modern world, the opportunities are now we’re such an industrialised system and we have a number of gaps, technical challenges, and where are we going to find the solutions? And some of those solutions are really right under our nose and just about putting seaweed back into the system. So, first of all, the opportunity with getting seaweed back into the food chain, it’s not only for the reasons of sustainability. You know, we’re growing seaweed 50 times faster than land crops. It doesn’t use any fresh water. We don’t have any waste products from it. But not only that, it’s putting back essential nutrients that the modern world is deficient in and leads to many of our chronic health issues. Iodine deficiency is still the leading cause of preventable brain damage in the world today, according to the World Health Organisation. I mean, this is serious stuff. And so, just a sprinkle of seaweed is a reason for us to be putting it back in our food chain for our brain health. I mean, China is one of the world leaders in seaweed production and they knew that iodine deficiency, even Confucius knew iodine deficiency was a problem and that seaweed in our diet in China, because the soils are not very rich in iodine in land, is going to be important. And so, that is one of the reasons they are now one of the leading producers of seaweed. And today it’s the biggest aquaculture crop by mass in the world. And Australia doesn’t really appreciate that this is a serious crop in the oceans. And so that’s where just simply iodine deficiency is that opportunity, iron deficiency and all sorts of nutrients and seaweeds can fill the gap. But like with any of our other agricultural products, whether it’s timber straw and aside from the foods, seaweed can create a new resource that grows really fast, very renewable and there’s all sorts of new technologies that we could apply using the novel compounds that are in seaweed. And some of those can be for one day, you know, people talking about bioplastics and things like that. And that is technically correct. Whether it’s economically feasible today is a question. But yes, we can make pretty exciting materials from seaweed. Every industry that we work with, I think we could put seaweed into and we already are in a way, you know, the molecules that are grown in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, they grow seaweed big time. They grow red seaweed. That seaweed – molecules from that would be in the paint on the walls here today. They would be in the ink on your paper there today. They will probably be in the toothpaste that you brush your teeth with this morning. So, seaweed – fire hydrants here will have seaweed molecules in them. And that’s where Australia sort of looks to what we’re doing as, oh, that’s a cute novel thing. No seaweed ingredients are actually already in so many of the global industrial technologies, and Australia really missed the ball on that one. So, we have an opportunity in front of us, but the world has across – the Western world especially really hasn’t embraced it and we have such an opportunity to develop new technologies around seaweed.

It’s sustainable, it’s quick growing. That sounds to me like there are benefits here for the climate.

Yes. So, that’s where the benefits of seaweed I would say we are the in essence the fastest carbon capturing mechanism on the block. We really grow – capture carbon very fast. We can grow seaweed 50 times faster than crops on land in general.

That’s incredible. Is that just the seaweed? Is that just what it does? Or is that because of what – like how you’re helping it?

Yes, well, it’s in part how we’re helping it, but it’s also because seaweed and all seaweeds grow in the ocean. They don’t actually have to produce all of this other stiff material like a tree has to grow all cellulose and stuff to keep it standing up straight. Seaweeds are pretty floppy and supported by the ocean. And so, they can put all their energy into just growing. Like our seaweed has no other body parts except let’s grow seaweed. And so it’s homogeneous. It’s all cells you can eat, there’s no waste products of it. And so, it can put all its energy into just growing seaweed. And in that way, it grows a lot faster than land crops to start with. But then on top of that, we can actually catch carbon dioxide, which we’re currently doing today from a large fermentation plant that makes the 10 and the E10 fuel and makes most of the gin in South East Asia. So, we capture the CO2 from that fermentation process into the seaweed because the seaweed catching the CO2 so fast, it’s actually one of the limiting factors in it. I can’t grow fast because I don’t have enough food, so it’s actually like a natural fertiliser. And so, the more we can give it, the more it’s going to grow, so we can accelerate it through that process as well. And by capturing lost nitrogen in waste streams that we’re throwing around the coastline as well, we can just keep everything up to the seaweed and keep it growing as fast as it wants. The only thing we can’t add more of is the sun. The only limiting factor in the end now for us is how many rays of sunlight are coming down and hitting the seaweed. That’s it. It is growing at its maximal rate now and we just can’t add more sun rays. We could start inserting light infrastructure, but then it becomes a very big engineering feat.

Can we start talking about food, then. Okay, so you’re saying Australia’s missed the boat, but obviously it’s something that’s proven around the world. It’s something that you can people are already eating seaweed. So, what’s the opportunity here for us?

Oh yeah, well, we just need to catch up very fast, that’s one thing. But also it’s like, well, let’s not just copy what has already happened because we have our own very unique seaweeds, just like we have kangaroos, koalas and gum trees on land. We also have our very own unique species of seaweeds.

I want to know about them. Tell me about Aussie seaweed.

Well, we’ve got so many types. I mean, everyone would know about the Neptune’s necklace on our foreshore is it’s uniquely Australian. It’s called Hormosira banksii because Mr Banks himself wrote about it, I guess. And so, that’s a uniquely Australian iconic seaweed. We need to be proud. It’s such a groovy seaweed Neptune’s necklace. And similarly, we have so many others and we don’t actually have a lot of the ones that are commercialised in the northern hemisphere. There’s a bit of noise around seaweed at the moment. And so, in the northern hemisphere they’re growing a lot of sugar kelp, which is really rich in iodine and yeah, it’s great. And they’ve worked out the systems to do it, so they’re starting to expand that. But we don’t have sugar kelp here and we don’t have things that people call me like, oh, do you have any Irish Moss No, I don’t, because they grow that in Ireland, we have Australian seaweed.

Clue’s in the name mate.

Exactly so.

On seaweed as food, do they all taste the same?

No. No, they don’t. And we have actually a PhD student working on a project now on the – she’s calling it the 50 aromas of seaweed. But it’s got all sorts of different aromas in it and she’s looking at how we ferment them and we also sometimes need to get rid of some of the aromas. So, our seaweed is very sulphury. We call it the truffle of the sea. It’s very truffley. And people may be familiar with one in the northern hemisphere, the dulce, the one that’s traditionally eaten in Ireland, a red seaweed. And they say when you fry it, it tastes like and smells like bacon. I don’t know if it’s exactly like that, but it definitely has its own aroma. And we’ve become a little bit unfamiliar with some of those aromas, which is why it can be a little bit challenging for Westerners. But, you know, in some parts of Japan, 10% of their diet is seaweed by choice because they think it tastes good. And the more you eat it, you get accustomed and start needing some of the flavours from seaweed. And there’s a natural aromas in it as well, like a flavour enhancers or MSG, that’s a natural trigger for us to eat. That is in seaweed and sea foods. So, the umami of food can come from seaweed as well. So, it’s about working with the flavours. You know, we don’t eat garlic raw on its own either. But you love the flavour of garlic when it’s put into food with a fantastic chef. And the same thing happens with seaweed. As long as you’ve got the chefs using it in the right way, it’s marvellous.

Which is it that you work on specifically? Let’s talk PhycoGreen. What is it?

So it’s our green species of seaweed that we farm here in Australia, species 84. And it’s vibrant. I don’t think we can have any more emerald vibrance from the ocean than PhycoGreen, it’s super green. And it’s the one species that we found uniquely Australian can grow a lot of protein. We can do like about 30 per cent protein. So, if we’re growing 100 tonnes on a hectare, that’s 30 tonnes of protein on a hectare, that’s a lot of protein production on a very small area using no fresh water. But not only that, the molecules in PhycoGreen are pretty exciting. Every seaweed has its own unique gel, or slime. We know seaweeds are slimy, but those slimes are not random slimes and they’re very unique to every seaweed. They’re part of the interface of the seaweed to its environment, between the seaweed cells and the rest of the ocean is slime. It’s the communication system between the two. It’s the microbiome of the seaweed. It’s the defence system of the seaweed. It’s a bit like the defence system in the mucus in our guts, and it actually is really purposefully designed to defend. It evolves all the time and the molecules in green seaweeds and in our one that we work with are pretty exciting because they actually are closer to animal gels than they are to other seaweed gels. And it’s one of the reasons when we purify those, we can put them into human cell systems and human cells will attach to it and go, you’re me, I can land on you, I can start growing on you, I can create collagen and elastin on you. And we’ve now created full thickness skin tissue in the lab using our seaweed gel because it’s like our own gels. There’s all these molecular signatures. It’s these – they are called molecular recognition pathways, and they’re secret codes going on. This whole world of gel science is actually a really exciting frontier, especially for people in this space of seaweed, because seaweed gels are poorly explored and they’re very different to land plants. The opportunity of linking seaweed gels into human health and medical research is a very exciting frontier.

It’s so cool. So, everything from feeding us to fixing us. One last thing on the food situation. Thirty tons of protein out of a hectare. That surely could be used to help with food insecurity. I mean, people need protein. That sounds like a pretty good return on investment.

Yes, the amount of food that you can produce in two ways, one in terms of quantity because, yes, 30 tonnes on a hectares of protein alone is hard to beat. And then we’ve also got all the fibres and the other nutrients that are important. But yeah, it’s very hard to beat the abundance of food that you can do on a small footprint. And in that way, the climate opportunities are there as well in that we don’t have to use as much land to grow as much food. So, you’re saving land space. You don’t have to use as much transport. You don’t have to have as much fossil input. So, in that way, you’re making huge efficiency gains in your food production system. So, the amount of food, amazing. Also though, the quality of food. Iodine deficiency again, iron deficiency, so, anaemia. Anaemia is still the leading cause of maternal deaths in the world today. Twenty per cent of maternal deaths are because of a lack of iron. And that’s a bit scary. And our seaweed is very rich in iron. And the ocean is so rich in all of the trace elements that get leached from soil and end up in the ocean. So, that’s – it’s a very rich source of so many of the nutrients missing in the food. So, from a food security perspective, it’s the abundance, the efficiency, the fossil inputs that you don’t have to have anymore to produce that food. And also, the density of the nutrients, the nutrients that are missing in our food chain – we can put those back by having seaweed sprinkled throughout our food system.

One of the problems with doing agriculture on land is monoculture. Right, like slash a place, grow one thing, all of a sudden that’s actually pretty bad for the ecosystem. Is that similarly a problem in the ocean or no?

So seaweed is a – I have been saying this for 20 years, it’s amazing. It’s sustainable. But then again, you can get into a space where it gets oversimplified, and it becomes a solution for everything and anything humans do. Even good things like seaweed you can do wrong. And seaweed does already have some environmental impacts in certain places. One thing is, don’t put cane toads from Asia into Australia and don’t put seaweeds from this place into that place. And that’s why we should grow Australian seaweeds. So, species, pest species, and stuffing up ecosystems with new species is a no no, don’t do that. Each nation has its own amazing species of seaweed, so let’s stick with that. Another one is, most of the seaweed in the world today is farmed out at sea, and that’s what people would be hearing about. And so, that’s then giant – you can see them from space, giant areas of lines growing seaweeds. And in some of the developing countries, the opportunity to grow seaweed is so strong and important for their income that they’ll do whatever it takes to keep the seaweed lines floating. And that means Styrofoam. So, plastic bottles and Styrofoam pollution, seaweed takes a big responsibility for that. And again, seaweed farming is good. We just have to do it right. And you can’t just go seaweed farming, seaweed farming and block out all of the surrounding systems that will support it. And so, yes, we can do things wrong with seaweed. And so, we just need to be very wary of how we do it.

And you obviously have that in mind. And you have two companies, Venus Shell Systems and PhycoHealth. Okay, so you were in academia and obviously you saw an opportunity here and decided to walk away from that. Tell me about what got you into industry?

Well, my frustration in sitting in academia in an ivory tower telling the world how it should be done and then nothing happening. And that, for me, was a frustration. The purpose of me doing the research in the first place was like, we’ve got these problems, how can we solve them? Oh, I need to understand them. Science will lead me there, then you understand it. And you say, well, the world should be doing this. But I mean, we know that from the climate change story we’ve been telling the world forever. There’s a problem. We shouldn’t be doing that. Is the world listening? No. It’s hard to get the science message across to activate change. And so for me, it was like, well, I’ve just got to get out there and do it and sit in between the two worlds. I really feel that that is where the frontier of sustainability and opportunity is. It’s about connecting the dots, connecting the systems because science is so busy at the frontier of novel science. A scientist only gets paid to invent frontier stuff. The next thing, the next publication. And it’s very hard to make that join in to the solutions we need today. There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening at the front end for sustainability, but we actually have solutions that we could act on today, like growing seaweed. But we can only do it when we start to link into other industries. Like I’m not now linked to a prawn farm, I’m linked to a giant wheat refinery that’s making our bread and fuel. And so, we’re taking the nutrient streams from the wheat refinery and we’re capturing what is lost, was a wasted, lost resource, and we’re putting it into seaweed as a new crop. And then we’re using the seaweed into new food systems. And to join all of those dots is not considered sort of frontier science yet. And that’s where you sort of have to get out of academia to activate it. And doing it on each day you come to start growing seaweed, to put it into a product there, to try and dry it over there. Each day gives you a practical challenge. And those practical challenges aren’t really what science does either. It’s like, oh, it works – when you’ve got to dry this much seaweed, that doesn’t work. So, we’ll have to make a machine that fixes it this way. And so, it’s really – I needed to have engineers with me, electricians with me. These are the people that help me solve the practical challenges of how do we grow it?, how do we dry it?, how do we put it in that food? and all of those things. And so, that’s where you have to step out of science to do that. And the traditional industries are too busy trying to make their daily ends meet, that’s where we sit. But now the partnerships we’re generating, I just love it. You know, we are doing engineering plumbing solutions that are really exciting with the tradies in the south coast, while at the same time I’m working with researchers like Fiona Wood, who’s developed the skin spray to heal burns victims. And the same time we’re doing clinical study in prison to show how Omega-3 from the seaweed is important through the food chain to the brain of prisoners so they don’t get so angry so easily because that’s what Omega-3 in the brain can help with. So, it’s exciting to work with all of the people that can connect these dots, and that’s where a change is going to happen.

Sounds like you are the person who’s connecting the dots, who’s just looking up being like, alright, I’ve got a solution, who’s got a problem? Actually I heard, just now, you talk about wheat farmers. I assume you’re talking about wastes from wheat farming, that you’re using?

Absolutely. Like so our seaweed is now capturing the waste from wheat processing stream. So, I mean, wheat is an amazing, amazing crop that, you know, I mean, we just know from the very unfortunate situation in the Ukraine how vital wheat is, because suddenly 30 per cent of the world’s weight is cut off. And everyone’s like – so that’s where, you know, people say, oh, how cute, you put seaweed in pasta. You know how much pasta there is in the world. Do you know how many people rely on the force of wheat. Wheat is in our bread. I mean, how old is that for us, breaking the bread and wheat is essential to us when we use it in so many things. And now on the south coast, we have one of the largest wheat refineries in the world there, and they are making all sorts of products from wheat and trying to avoid any of the waste strains from wheat as well. So, that wheat is then creating things like glucose that say goes into all the jellybeans that we have. But also importantly, it’s creating protein that goes into aqua feeds. And we even export protein to the US from our wheat in Australia. They make the E10 in ethanol, the gin in the southern hemisphere, wheats are really essential. But when you break a wheat down and you’re processing it, any food we process, whether we’re making cheeses, there’s waste streams. And the nitrogen waste streams coming off every continent on earth today are humongous. Nitrogen waste streams are one of the hidden things that people don’t understand yet, they think it’s just carbon that’s the problem. Nitrogen is a huge problem and it’s a problem directly in the coastlines today where we’re leaking nitrogen from our food production systems, including wheat. And like in Queensland, you know, half the problem on the Barrier Reef is, there’s all this nitrogen running out to sea. So, we need to be looking at systems that we can capture that nitrogen with and bring it back into the food chain and not leak so much of it. Every lifeform, every industry is working with nitrogen energy systems, and we can link into those with seaweed. So, that’s where the opportunity with land-based industries is, is that we can utilise and create a circular economy with their waste streams.

So, you’re doing it with wheat. Do you think there are other opportunities here just across industry to just be saying, oh, you’re actually throwing that thing away and I can use that.

Exactly. And we can use any organic source, whether it’s a chicken waste farm, you know, chicken poo is great. It’s full of nitrogen. And then you’ve got say things like sugarcane waste is quite poor in nitrogen, but really rich in carbon. Those two waste streams together are magic for us. All we need is a biogas plant in between, and we can convert that to a liquid ‘tea’ that feeds our seaweeds and recreates a new food system without having to do the fossil inputs of synthetic fertilisers to create the food in the beginning. We are sitting on a battery of energy and nutrients in the food waste system that we really have not appreciated to date. It is a massive resource that we have not linked in to.

Sugar cane and chicken poo tea, not to my taste, but I’m glad that seaweed’s totally up for it. Really. Okay, so food great. What about other things? Are you – you’re also looking at the pharmaceutical side of things. You’ve yourself had quite the experience that was very eye opening here. Would you like to share?

Yes. Well, you never expect seaweed to be a dangerous journey. But yes, ironically, when I was doing the wound healing extract, and that’s where you go hmm, is someone listening what I’m asking for here. But the wound healing research I was doing and creating these seaweed extracts for the Fiona Wood Research, unfortunately involves large machines and pumps. And on one unfortunate day, I got my hair caught in the driveshaft of a pump and it ripped my scalp off. So, yes, doing wound healing extracts, I got one of the most severe wounds. And that sort of though, has allowed me as well as someone going, oh, we could use seaweed for wound healing. But to also really understand it from the clinician’s perspective of like, wow, how do you deal with a wound like this? Technically, it’s really challenging. So yes, I experienced that a little bit too close to call, but I can say now I’ve got skin in the game – that one of the few people that can say that. But it’s an amazing opportunity to understand how human tissue and the gels that we’re extracting work together. And honestly, I’m just amazed and so lucky of all the science and technology that went into what they can do today to replace a scalp. You know, they worked for 6 hours on trying to reattach the scalp to my head. It didn’t work. They were up to midnight trying to do it. So, they took a split skin graft from my thigh and stapled that to my head. And just all of that innovation. And since then I’ve had seven surgeries to reconstruct and stretch a remaining scalp over my head to do that. So, working with the clinicians and understanding it firsthand is amazing. And I’m one of the lucky ones because there’s so many other people with so much more tragic outcomes from burns, for example. Children’s burns, volcano burns. All sorts of things. And it’s that frontier that I can take this knowledge that I’ve harnessed from a personal experience and know how it makes sense to develop those things in the real world.

What other applications are there? Beyond the skin healing side of things?

So, just on the gel itself is really exciting. So, we’ve done research now in the gut. We know that the human gut is the frontier of our immune system. So, we’re looking at when we’re adding seaweed gels to our gut and feeding different gut flora, we’re actually recreating an ecosystem there that has a better defence system, I guess, we’re able to show how we can reduce inflammation in the gut and improve human health outcomes, sort of pre-diabetic situations for people in that way. So, that’s the gel side of things. I mentioned before that the opportunity with the human brain and the Omega-3s. Omega-3s come from algae and seaweed. The fish don’t make it, they accumulate it. And so, although we’re eating fish, we’re eating algal Omega-3 molecules from the start. They’re the things that make it and a human brain has to have Omega-3 to work properly. And so, the only source of that is algae. I often wonder about that. You know, Elon Musk wants us to go to Mars. Has he thought about bringing the algae? Because seriously, we need it in our brains and there’s nowhere else to get it from. So, we need to bring those systems with us. We can’t just make them. There’s a bit of a naivety in thinking we just need energy, protein and that’s it. We actually need quite complex molecules and we can’t create them. We can’t create Omega-3. And so, algae, in our clinical studies we found that supplementing algae Omega-3 into the diet of prisoners is linked to their aggression and impulsive behaviour because Omega-3 molecules are in the cell membranes of algae and humans and fish and those cell membranes, they need to fire signals, especially in your brain. And if you don’t have Omega-3 making those fluid membranes around cells to fire signals the communication won’t work so well and that gives you a short fuse. And so now with Omega-3 in the diet of humans being such an important thing but missing from the food chain in Australia, we get like 10 per cent of the Omega-3 that we need, on average, as recommended by the World Health Organisation. And so where are we going to get it from? We’re not going to get it from the fish. We have to get it from the algae and that source at the beginning. So, we really need to start looking at the opportunities around seaweed and algae and producing so much of our brainpower even. So, it’s an unending frontier of opportunity in what you can get out of seaweeds and algae.

And actually, you were saying before that there were already learnings and I know you work quite closely with the Indigenous communities on the south coast of New South Wales. How has your work intersected with that First Nations knowledge?

Well around the Jervis Bay area, I mean, they’re saltwater people and some of the Aunties there, and its actually women’s business to work with the seaweed stuff, which is nice to know. But yeah, they knew about, you know, green seaweeds are good for your gut. All right. I had to do all this genetic research and clinical studies to work it out. But they knew that over the use for so many years. And they’re also very strongly linked to the – some of the Aunties in Jervis Bay are still eating the periwinkles. And they are 90 something and their eyes are glowing. There’s no lifespan issue with our First Nations people. It’s a dietary and lifestyle issue that has been enforced on them. And these seaweeds are, you know, First Nations and all of the seafood around there, they’re First Nations knowledge and traditions. And we’ve stripped it away from the younger generations who are losing the connection to that. And that’s where I would love to, and I have been involving the First Nations people of the south coast as much as I can in what we do because it’s their frontier and to bring them along with us, I’ve got I’ve got young kids from Wreck Bay working in our factory after school and things like that. So, the more we can do to bring this new opportunity forward with our First Nations people, empowering them with a sense of ownership, not just following what we do, a sense of ownership, wow, you knew this and we know this. Let’s put our minds together and create some real opportunity here. And the south coast — fishing has been an important industry for them as well. And the south coast fishing industry is sort of now reached a more manageable, sustainable level of fishing. But what are the future employment opportunities in a region where fishing has declined a little bit and some traditional industries have declined? Well, wow, regenerating food and nutrition from the sea is such an opportunity for the First Nations people there. And similarly New Zealand First Nations, people in North America and Canada, many First Nations people working in the space of seaweed opportunities. And I’d say that Australia, though, has to be one of the first innovators of seaweed. You know, 30,000-year-old relics exist of giant kelp water carriers from Tasmania and I would say it has to be one of the first pieces of evidence of human use, industrial use, of seaweed in that way.

So, everything from pulling down tons and tons of carbon feeding the world. Pharmaceutical benefits. Gut health. Brain health. Sounds to me like a bit of a silver bullet. I have obviously heard a lot of people in the past say ‘seaweed can save the world’. I guess I always have a bit of a pause when something can fix everything, sometimes that actually means it can fix nothing. It’s needs to be scalable. What’s your thought here? What’s your feeling on seaweed?

Well, we’ve already had a few examples of scares with the algae world. I don’t know if you recall a decade or two ago, there was the algal biofuels hype. It’s that, yeah, well, you know, the fuel we’re using actually did come from algae. It’s just been buried for so long and now we’re burning it up again. But for us to be able to reproduce the algae fuel at that rate is practically impossible, to replace what we’re doing with fossil sources. So, although they were promoting something technically correct in the lab, the promise of it as a solution was incorrect. But the hope-ium they could sell, I call it hope-ium, it’s like, yeah, good idea. It makes people feel good when you pay for it, but it’s actually not the end solution. And you can see that the hope-ium of seaweed is coming around and there’s many opportunities, there’s a few over-exaggerated claims, and there’s also very wrong ways we can do it, because anything that gets to monoculture, mass scale is out of balance. So, we’ve got to use seaweed to balance things. And that’s where our opportunities, we’re so massively out of balance. So, it is a massive opportunity of rebalance, but you don’t want to go beyond that and over balance it. It has to be done in a very sustainable way and you have to be aware of the ecosystem flows in and out that you’re dealing with.

How much do you think is there left to discover? How much more surprise does seaweed have in store for us?

I just sit here going, people don’t know how much there is, there is so much. And especially in the frontier of these gel molecules. I mean, the number of species we’ve got is incredible. The number of – I mean, I’ve got kids coming up to me, who come to our factory, who have gone away and done their year 12 project and built stand up paddleboards with seaweed. I’m just like, wow. So, it’s like, if we can just get the seaweed out to everybody with a good idea and have all of these new innovations and things built with seaweed and sustainable materials, well, that’s a super exciting frontier. But then at the sort of molecular level of things, the geeky side of me, sustainability is my driver, but sustainability is leading to such exciting opportunity that will pull the seaweed sustainability story along, because that’s why I’ve gone into the market, because the market has to pull the solution. You can’t just force a solution. You have to pull it mostly with the economy. And so, that’s where there’s so much opportunity in seaweed and the whole frontier of the gel science cannot be underestimated. This glycosphere, we call it. Glyco is sugars or gels, and the signatures of these molecules are the frontier of vaccines. The COVID vaccine was linked to sugar communication, gel communication between cell and the rest of the world. Our immune system, the tissues we’re building. There’s so much secret coding in gels and seaweeds are the kings of gel coding. And so, gel coding is the frontier of seaweed for me.

Take me forward. Where are we with seaweeds in ten years time.

Well, seaweed is already in the marine sphere in Southeast Asia and China area. The largest aquaculture crop of biomass in the world today. And we haven’t really understood that. So, I see that seaweed in Australia should be at least as big as 10 per cent of the wheat industry. And if we could achieve that, well, that’s 10 per cent of the sort of impact and carrying capacity of our food system. It’s huge. I mean, I even have been looking at the southern shores of Ukraine for the rebuilding of it is like, oh yeah, they’ve got that seaweed there, the salinity is good there, they grow wheat there. We can do it over there as well. That this technology of capturing nutrients and recycling it has opportunity all over the world. And so, I can see that it’s not just the seaweed products we’re exporting, but the services of seaweed that we can start to use. I mean, the English are now suing the French for polluting the English Channel with nitrogen. Europe is fining the Netherlands for the nitrogen pollution that they’re putting out to sea. And a lot of the dead zones around the world in coastal areas are because of nitrogen pollution. So, this is a huge service that seaweed can offer to the world. We now take our sewage systems for granted because we were preventing pathogens from coming back to hit us. But now we need to work on preventing nitrogen from coming back and hitting us and seaweed is going to be a very big part of that solution, as well as a crop that can feed the world.

Pia thank you so much.

Thank you.

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This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.