Surprises From Seaweed: Multiplicity Of Products Meets Many Of Man’s Needs

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 85, 23 August 1948, Page 7

Surprises From Seaweed: Multiplicity Of Products Meets Many Of Man’s Needs

Stockings from the sea . . . beautiful, glamorous hose ... it sounds like fantasy, but ''it is really fact. For science in its campaign to wrest riches from the sea has learned that seaweed can be made to yield among other things a sheer, delicate, spidery yarn. But science must win the most crucial round with Nature: harvesting in commercial quantities the under-water seaweed growing between one and seven fathoms down. Technicians are tackling this cardinal problem, and early reports from trials suggest that a system—so far undisclosed—-has been evolved whereby the seaweed can be gathered with relative ease. Before the Scottish Seaweed Research Association lies an ambitious programme. A biological division is tracing the ideal environment for these plants, and a chemical division is unravelling their secrets so that the constituents can be harnessed to commercial ends. One of the salient secrets that laboratory tests have uncovered is that one particular seaweed extract —christened algin or alginic acid—when mixed with a metal, can be spun like cellulose into a form of rayon. Of great strength and lustre, this alginate rayon is entirely fireproof and waterproof. The fibres, when woven in large numbers, can be used for curtains and other furnishing fabrics. Even diaphanous lingerie material can be evolved. Technically this beautiful fabric is woven with the aid of the alginate rayon yarn, and after the weaving process the alginate is dissolved in an alkali solution, leaving a textile of cobweb-like delicacy. Some of this featherweight fabric has already found its way to American and South American markets. Algin, science reveals, possesses properties rather like cellulose. If treated with tannin and caustic soda, transparent paper with a texture like “Cellophane” results. Treated with a vulcanising agent, it yields a rubber-like material which is now used to make typewriter rollers. From seaweed come cosmetiics, plastics, paints, polishes, food and pharmaceutical preparations, even ice cream. And already this valuable raw material, which hitherto had been regarded as a fetid coastal nuisance, is reappearing in a variety of guises in home, office and factory, and still vaster fields await to be tapped. In medicine and chemistry seaweed has also given proof of its worth. Because of its non-inflam-mable properties and the extreme delicacy of its fibre, one field in which seaweed is notably valuable is brain and eye surgery, however strange it may seem that seawrack —the detached, ugly masses of seaweed strewn along parts of the coast —-should be of such widespread benefit to humanity. Rich in potash, it has formed the staple manure for the Arran Isles and Hebrides. And in the Orkneys farmers capitalise it as cattle food, taking their sheep to graze on seawrack at low tide. Similarly, in New Zealand, dairy farmers wash and chop seaweed for ues as fodder for the herds. This largely bears out what many agricultural experts claim, that seaweed is an excellent diet. In some parts of the world seaweed is also prized as a food item for humans. One species—pink laver—is a noted delicacy in Japan. On the lirsh and Scottish coasts dulse, laver and murlin are frequently served at meals as vegetables, and a variety appears as laver bread in Wales. Agar-agar is essential in the world’s medical laboratories where dangerous bacteria are studied and bred; also in the manufacture of certain medicines. At present thousands of tons of seaweed are imported annually into Britain from Eire and Norway. One firm alone uses 15,000 to 20,000 tons each year, chiefly from Eire. From it is extracted calcium alginate, a versatile product; it appears in an assortment of foodstuffs, it performs a vital role in certain surgical materials, and because of its texture it is ideal for making capsules of all kinds and in preparing dried blood.