Humble seaweed....?

Picking my way gingerly over the skerries the other day while trying to recapture Rory (wayward Vizsla pup), I was struck by just how much slippery seaweed there is when you could really do without it. Rory had found a dead crab...probably dead for several days and he badly wanted to eat it, hence my efforts to recapture him. (I really didn't want its reappearance on the carpet at two in the morning....) But the seaweed didn't make it at all easy and there was just so much of it. I vaguely remembered seeing pictures of people collecting it in the island communities but couldn't remember for what purpose so, on retrieving Rory (crabless, thank goodness), I headed for home to check up on it.

It would seem that many coastal communities in Britain, including those of the East Neuk, collected it as a useful fertiliser. In fact, many locals still do. Its collection reached almost industrial proportions from the late seventeenth century when valuable soda and potash were extracted from it. The Western Isles and Orkney were mainly involved in this industry but records also link Anstruther to its early production.

It also seems to have been widely used as a foodstuff and there are numerous traditional recipes to be found. Several appear on the Flora Celtica website http://193.62.154.38/celtica/recipesb.htm along with a warning about the effect on the plant of modern day pollutants which suggests caution in your culinary experimentation! Dulse (seaweed) soup seems to be the classic dish of choice.

It would appear that extracts of the plant have a wide and ever-increasing array of uses from thickening ice cream to creating luxury cosmetics. And, of course, if you miss the breakfast TV forecast, you can always use it to predict the weather.

However, by far the most exciting, and possibly controversial, use for seaweed is as a biofuel. It needs no irrigation and doesn't divert land from food crops or lead to deforestation. As an island nation we have easy access to an extensive coastline so supplies of the fuel are local. Apparently the large kelp species which are best suited to biofuel production grow well in our waters. Electricity and heat are generated from the combustion of methane produced from the seaweed through anaerobic digestion (phew!) This technology is already well established.

Seaweed could be harvested from the wild or cultivated, as it is in China, where it is a food crop. But if our own abundance of seaweed is to be harvested wild from our deeper waters this would clearly need to be done sustainably. If that is possible, there is boundless potential for this amazing plant in the renewable energy 'mix'.

Something I'll have to keep in mind the next time I slither about on the skerries, cursing the stuff...

Photo by Adrian Tritschler