Kelp Part 2 - from alginates to neutraceuticals

Kelp burning at Inch Kenneth, Mull, 1817 by William Daniell - picture credit Watercolourworld.org

In Part 1 I described how the kelp industry - the gathering and burning of seaweed to produce a chemical rich material called kelp - had boomed around the turn of the 19th century, then collapsed before reviving on a smaller scale in the 1840s. The revival was more of a sputter than a boom but it lasted longer before ending in the early 1930s. During the original boom, kelp had been sought after as a source of alkalis (specifically sodium carbonate aka soda ash) used to make glass and soap but in the later 19th/early 20th century the valuable products were potash (a fertiliser) and iodine. In both cases, the Scottish industry fell victim to these chemicals becoming more cheaply available from alternative sources. In the 1860s, an English chemist called Edward Stanford had attempted to put the kelp business on a more scientific footing by establishing small factories on Tiree and North Uist. These were not very successful in financial terms but in 1883 Stanford had discovered a new seaweed extract called alginate (so called because seaweed is a type of algae). No commercial application for this had been found as at the end of kelping in the early 1930s but that was soon to change.

Kelp burners in Orkney 1889 - picture credit Am Baile

In 1934, a company called Cefoil Ltd was incorporated and opened a plant at Bellochantuy on the west coast of Kintyre where it tried to develop a "transparent paper" from alginate they intended to call cefoil. Their efforts were stymied by the arrival in the mid-1930s of the rival product cellophane (made from cellulose, a by-product of wood) but the company was saved by the outbreak of WW2. The Ministry of Supply had high hopes for alginates being a new wonder substance, made from raw material washed up on the shore and which might replace more traditional materials such as wood and metal made scarce by wartime conditions: there were even rumours of an experimental De Havilland Mosquito fighter bomber being made from alginate instead of the wood these highly successful aircraft were normally made from. You can read an article about the Bellochantuy factory, with photos of it, here. It closed in 1942 when the Ministry acquired three new sites at Barcaldine on Loch Creran, Kames by Loch Melfort and Girvan to allow Cefoil to expand production. But despite the hopes, the only product alginates were used for to any significant extent was camouflage netting: apparently this was known as "BG netting" standing for "Bloody Good" in contrast to many wartime alternative products labelled NBG (guess).

Concrete foundations of the Bellochantuy alginates factory still visible beside the A83 via Google Streetview

After the war, Cefoil bought the three new sites from the Ministry, changed its name to Alginate Industries Ltd (AIL) and alginates soon found their peacetime niche - making gels, films and thickening agents. For example, alginates is the stuff that gives shampoo its viscosity. And because alginates are edible, they have applications in the food and pharmaceuticals industries. It's the stuff that sausage skins are made of,  keeps the head on a pint of beer and gives toothpaste and ice cream its texture: one of AIL's early post-War breakthroughs was when Walls decided to use alginates in place of gelatine in their ice cream. (I recently noticed a Masterchef contestant  making some kind of sauce filled "bomb" in a capsule of alginate.) Pharmaceutical applications include the coatings of pills. Elsewhere, alginates are important in paper manufacture (the coatings of shiny papers) and textile printing (for reasons I don't understand). Basically, whenever you need a material that's gloopy, rubbery and/or shiny and is also edible, then alginates are likely to have a solution.

Ascophylum nodosum ("asco") at low tide on Loch Roag, Lewis - picture credit Tim Riches

Back on the shores of kyles and Western Isles, the seaweed most in demand for alginate production was egg wrack (or knotted wrack) known in the alginates industry as "asco" after its Latin name ascophyllum nodosum. Laminarias ("stem" in industry parlance) were also used to a lesser extent. Asco was cut by hand with sickles by crofters on a part time self employed basis. It was cut on an ebbing tide and roped into rafts which floated off on the rising tide and could be towed by boat to a point where it could be loaded onto a lorry: there's interesting video of the process in present day Ireland here (first video on the page). Harvesting asco involves cutting live plants year round in sheltered sea lochs while gathering stem involves collecting dead plants that have been torn from the seabed during winter storms and washed up ("beach cast") on exposed, generally western facing shores.

Beach cast stem (laminaria) on the west coast of Benbecula

Neither type of weed, asco or stem, is burnt to produce alginates as it was in kelp production. Instead it's dried (stem in the open air, asco in a drying factory) then milled to a coarse grain before being subjected to various chemical processes I don't pretend to understand (except that it involves floatation dejuicers). AIL opened drying and milling factories at Orasay on South Uist in 1944, Sponish at Loch Maddy on North Uist in 1955 and Keose on Loch Erisort on Lewis in 1965 (contemporary news article about the opening of Keose here - scroll to page 3). Due to its location on the west coast of South Uist, the Orosay factory processed stem (laminaria) and asco while the other two concentrated on asco. All three took weed not just from the Outer Hebrides but from the north west mainland coast and Tiree and Orkney (stem only from the latter two locations), collected by puffers and coasters which then took the dried and milled weed south to the floatation dejuicers at Barcaldine and Girvan for manufacture of the alginates. (The Loch Melfort factory closed in the late 1940s but the buildings still stand as you can see here.)

The coaster Glencloy loading weed at Sponish, Loch Maddy, North Uist in 1966 - picture credit Bobby via Shipsnostalgia

The early 1970s represented the high water mark of the seaweed for alginates industry in Scotland. The three Hebridean drying and milling factories between them processed nearly 20,000 tons of wet weed per year.  About 150 crofters, the majority of them in the Outer Hebrides, gathered weed (stem and asco) while a further 200 or so gathered stem in Orkney. About 75 people were employed at the three Hebridean factories and around 800 between the Girvan and Barcaldine alginate production plants. AIL was the world's largest supplier of alginates and sourced roughly a quarter of its weed from Scotland, another quarter from Ireland (where the history of the kelp/seaweed industries was roughly the same as here) and the rest from a variety of sources worldwide.

Cutting asco in Ireland - the cut weed will be enclosed by the blue rope so it floats off in a raft at high tide

In the late 1970s, however, darker clouds began to appear on the horizon of the Scottish alginates industry. In 1979, AIL was taken over by American pharmaceutical giant Merck and merged with their subsidiary Kelco, the Californian company which had pioneered the production of alginates from laminaria growing on the Pacific coast and was the world's second biggest producer. In 1980, Kelco/AIL sold the Keose and closed the Orosay drying and milling factories. Then Sponish closed in 1986. Kelco continued to take wet weed (now transported from the islands in lorries on car ferries due to the intervening demise of the puffer trade) but in ever dwindling quantities until it stopped altogether in 1998: with the alginates market maturing and coming under pressure from lower cost production in China, hand cut Scottish weed transported wet couldn't compete with mechanically harvested dried weed imported from abroad - bewildering as that sounds considering it was coming from places as far afield as Tasmania!

AIL's factory at Barcaldine in 1980 - picture credit (and lots more pictures) Canmore

The Barcaldine factory had previously closed in 1996 leaving the alginate production concentrated at Girvan. Further industry consolidation ensued: in 1999, Kelco (which in 1995 had been sold by Merck to American agri-chemicals giant Monsanto and merged with another subsidiary Nutrasweet) sold its alginates business to International Speciality Products Inc. They in turn sold it in 2009 to another big US chemicals firm, FMC Corp (who had also bid for AIL back in 1979 when Kelco bought it). FMC BioPolymer, as this division of their business was branded, promptly stopped production of alginates at Girvan in 2009 to concentrate its European production in Norway where it's closer to cheaper supplies of mechanically harvested weed. They nevertheless retain the Girvan plant, albeit with a greatly reduced workforce (200 down to 70), for the purposes of blending (mixing different grades of alginate produced elsewhere into a final product tailored to a particular application) and distribution.

Just to complete the tale of global corporate consolidation, in 2017 FMC BioPolymer was transferred by its parent, FMC, to American chemicals giant, DuPont. In exchange, FMC acquired the parts of DuPont's business it was required to divest itself of to clear EU anti-trust obstacles to its (DuPont's) merger with yet another big US chemicals firm, Dow. But it's DuPont's name that's now on the gate at Girvan.

                  
We seem to have wandered a long way from crofters gathering seaweed on Hebridean shores with sickles but behind the scenes of the consolidation in the worldwide alginates industry, the Scottish seaweed business struggled stubbornly on. Alone of the three Hebridean drying and milling plants, that at Keose on Loch Erisort in Lewis had a continued existence after it was disposed of by Kelco in 1980. For a few years it was run by a local weed cutters' co-operative and then had a succession of owners, the last being called Tavay Organic Products Ltd after the tidal islet the factory sits on. After Kelco stopped buying Scottish weed for alginate production at Girvan in 1998, Keose continued to use locally cut seaweed to produce agricultural products including fertilisers and animal feed. But it finally closed in 2003, its elderly equipment no longer economic to run.

The now roofless former seaweed factory at Keose, Lewis as seen on Google Streetview

But still the Scottish seaweed industry refused to die. Rather like when it looked as if kelping had finally come to an end in the early 1930s only for the ember to be fanned back into a flame a year or two later by Cefoil beginning alginates production in 1934, this time a former manager of the defunct Keose factory, Martin Macleod, picked up the torch. In what's almost a sort of apostolic succession from Edward Stanford attempting to put the struggling kelp industry on a more efficient footing with his factory on Tiree in 1860s and subsequently discovering alginates, Macleod formed the Hebridean Seaweed Company in 2005 operating from a new factory at Arnish just south of Stornoway. Hebridean has for the first time successfully brought mechanical harvesting of weed to the Scottish industry. Cefoil experimented with it unsuccessfully in the 1930s but mechanical harvesting has been the norm in other countries such as the USA and Norway for decades and the failure to develop it in Scotland led in no small part to the industry's demise here in the 1990s. Hebridean has a fleet of harvesting boats operating in the sea lochs of Lewis but also employs about 40 cutters working manually with sickles in the traditional way harvesting asco (the 21st century, post-alginates industry doesn't use stem (tangle/laminarias)). Since 2016, Hebridean has been two thirds owned by Irish company Marigot Ltd which owns a portfolio of biotech brands worldwide and in February 2019 they announced plans to expand their factory at Arnish and double the number of their employees to 26 (see here).

A Hebridean Seaweed Company harvester in action - a cross between a pedalo and a ride on lawnmower. Picture credit HM Treasury

Another recent entrant to the post-alginates seaweed revival is Uist Asco Ltd. This began in 2014 when the current generation of the Johnson family re-purposed their quarry on North Uist as a seaweed drying and milling factory in a £1 million investment. They were taken over in 2017 by Canadian company, Acadian Seaplants Ltd. That began in 1981 as a management buyout of the Nova Scotia seaweed harvesting operation of FMC, they who ended alginates production at Girvan in 2009. Acadian also bought Irish seaweed (asco) cutting and processing company Arramara in 2014. That started life in 1947 as none other than AIL's Irish operation (the seaweed industry is a small world!) with all its ouput shipped over to Scotland to be made into alginates at Barcaldine or Girvan. Starting in 1949 the Irish government took a progessively bigger share, ending up with 100% by 2006. Anyway, since taking over Arramara and Uist Asco, Acadian have introduced to Irish and Hebridean waters the Canadian "boat and rake" method of cutting asco - there's a video of that on Arramara's website here (second video on the page).

Boating and raking in the Uists - picture credit Uist Asco

It's interesting to see Uist Asco advertising training for potential new seaweed cutters on their Facebook page. They also recently announced an increase in the rate paid per tonne of wet asco from £28 to £32 (see here). Does this hint that there's a scarcity of cutters? If so, there's nothing new under the sun because the 1968 newspaper article about AIL's factory at Keose I linked to earlier (here - go to page 3) lamented that the plant was only operating at half capacity because not enough crofters were tempted by the offer of 25 shillings (£1.25) per ton. Note that £1.25 in 1968 is about £21 in today's money so there's been a real terms increase. And compare with the situation during the kelp boom of the early 19th century when crofters received somewhere in the region of £5-10 (in today's money) per ton of wet weed.

It's my understanding that cutters are self employed and are simply selling their "produce" to the likes of Uist Asco and Hebridean Seaweed. I'm not sure how that plays out with the fact that HS presumably own the mechanical harvesters and UA the boats and rakes - do the self employed cutters have to pay to rent the kit from the buyers? And considering it's not the cutters but the buyers (UA and HS) who hold the licences from the Crown Estate to take the weed, I wonder if this doesn't makes for a rather dubious employment law position (a la whether Uber drivers are self employed or really employees of Uber etc.).

           
The bread and butter of the post-alginates seaweed industry is animal feed and fertiliser (above): these are the "high volume-low value" (retailing at about £4-5/kg) products of seaweed. But there's also jam in the form of "low volume-higher value" products. Reminding me of the hopes of Edward Stanford in the 1880s and the Government at the start of the War, seaweed has again been hailed in the last decade as the new wonder material capable of curing everything from cancer to climate change. But amongst the higher value applications currently available are:

"healthy option" condiments and seasonings - retailing in the region of £150/kg. An example is  Mara Seaweed who harvest their own weed by hand in Fife where the Scottish kelp industry is thought to have begun back in the late 17th century;

"neutraceuticals" (dietary supplements) - retailing in the region of £500/kg - see here for example;

cosmetics and "cosmeceuticals" (cosmetics with bioactive ingredients purported to have medical benefits) - retailing at as far north as £1,500/kg - see Ishga Organic Seaweed Skincare in which the Hebridean Seaweed Company has a stake.     

The luxury end of the seaweed market

Away from the shelves of Fortnum & Mason and back at the "high volume-low value" end of the spectrum, there's a lot of interest in seaweed's potential for making bio-fuel (ethanol) due to the fact that, by its very nature, it doesn't compete with food crops for land and fresh water. And finally, alginates are trying to make a come back in Scotland. But I'll come back to that in the next chapter.