“I’ve never seen that happen before,” Ranah Chavoshi says, as a grey-and-white belted kingfisher plunges into the water directly in front of us and plucks a fish. Some cultures would consider that a good omen, she muses, as she watches the kingfisher alight on a nearby piling with his freshly caught snack.
It’s low tide on a crisp sunny afternoon in late January at Barnet Marine Park in Burnaby. Chavoshi is very familiar with this stretch of rocky coast, having spent hours and hours studying its seaweed for her undergraduate degree in biology from Simon Fraser University, where she specializes in aquatic toxicology and phycology, the study of seaweed.
Where casual beach strollers might see slimy, blobby things, the 32-year-old SFU master’s candidate sees “an entire foreshore full of life.”
Neither plant nor animal, seaweeds are a type of macro algae , she explains, crouched over a vibrant bed by the water’s edge. “They’re actually related to plants—they’re kind of like the offshoot cousin—but they don’t have any roots, stems, or leaves. They just grow in the ocean and they get the nutrients from the water and they photosynthesize as well. So they’re critical for the oceans and for providing habitat for the intertidal and subtidal species.”
Gently, she holds up a piece of greenish-brown Fucus distichus, which holds a special place in her heart. “Whenever I see this, I think of a superhardy seaweed that can handle four tides a day and survive almost anything, including freezing, superintense heat, like hours without water. I think that’s beautiful.”
Beautiful, resilient—and possibly part of the solution to our planet’s growing plastic pollution problem, if Chavoshi can bring her vision to fruition.
It was early in the pandemic, with Chavoshi’s research sites temporarily closed, when inspiration struck: what if she could use seaweed to create a natural, fully compostable plastic alternative that functions like plastic without polluting the environment?
Having first witnessed large-scale marine plastic pollution off the coast of Borneo on a scuba diving excursion five years earlier, the haunting images from that boat ride still lingered. “I’d never seen anything like it before,” she recalls. “You just are going through a sea of plastic, like every wave that comes into shore, onto the beach, it’s just piles of plastic, just nonstop…My heart kind of broke a little bit. When you experience something like that, it changes you.”
We know plastic is harmful, she says. “We know how bad it is. We know it’s fossil-fuel derived. We know how energy-intensive it is to make. We know that it breaks down into micro- and nanoplastics that in turn impact us as well, in our food, our water, our air. It’s an amazing innovation, if you think about it, but at the same time, it has a massive cost.”
So she tried to create her own safer alternative using the stretchy seaweed she’d been studying. “It was an awful prototype,” she says with a laugh, remembering the smelly mess and her partner’s protests as she turned her specimens into mush in their kitchen. “But it worked!”
Chavoshi is far from the first scientist to find inspiration in seaweed. From the beauty and wellness sectors to nutrition, skin care, and even bioplastics, seaweed is a hot commodity these days. But Chavoshi has high hopes for her refined prototype. She’s been working on a seaweed-based, plastic-like film that is fully compostable and will break down quickly and easily into its core components without leaving behind harmful residue like microplastics. She has her sights set on farms, where she hopes to pilot her innovation with a handful of early adopters this spring to replace the rows and rows of plastic mulch film farmers typically wrap around their seedlings to protect them, often leaving microplastic residue in the soil and our food chain.
Reaching this pilot scale-up stage hasn’t been easy. After more than a year of experimenting with different prototypes, Chavoshi decided to try to bring her idea to market. She co-founded a seaweed startup company called PhyCo in 2022 with fellow scientist Stacey Goldberg after they met online at a networking event for innovators. Together, they have won more than a dozen awards and grants in the past three years, including Chavoshi’s first-place finish in Ocean Wise’s inaugural Innovator Lab for youth. “She’s definitely an innovative thinker and a go-getter,” Goldberg says of her young co-founder. “She inspires me.”
Having spent 25 years researching marine biology, biotechnology, and microbiology in mostly academic and nonprofit settings and a few industrial labs, Goldberg says the shift to leading PhyCo’s rapid scientific development process has been refreshing.
As PhyCo’s chief scientific officer, she is particularly focused on the end-of-life portion of Chavoshi’s seaweed equation: how to ensure the seaweed-based film breaks down fully after it does its job in the fields or elsewhere. “I care very deeply about that,” she says.
As a microbiologist, Goldberg finds the mounting evidence of visible plastic waste in our environment distressing, but even more alarming are the smaller particles we don’t see but unknowingly ingest. That’s why she’s developing microbial technology, working with enzymes, for example, to ensure the breakdown of PhyCo’s seaweed products and to accelerate their decomposition.
The product’s early life is equally important to its co-founders. PhyCo’s goal is to partner with small seaweed farmers in Indigenous and other coastal communities in Canada who will harvest the crops responsibly.
Shannon Arnold recently created a support hub to empower small seaweed farmers in Nova Scotia’s rural, coastal communities to do just that. As the associate director of marine programs for the province’s nonprofit Ecology Action Centre, Arnold knows the importance of sustainable practices. She’s been working with community-based fisheries and sea farmers in Canada and around the world for 18 years. Now she’s excited to work with PhyCo. This year, the EAC’s hub is growing thousands of pounds of kelp for Chavoshi and Goldberg. In the future, Arnold hopes the local seaweed farmers she’s assisting will fill the order themselves.
“What is great about working with PhyCo is that they’re really focused on good business—like building it slowly, making sure the farmers are getting a good price, making sure they’re working with communities, Indigenous communities in particular who are interested in this as an opportunity,” she says.
To her, the key to sustainable seaweed farming lies in the scale. While everything has an impact, she acknowledges, small to medium-sized local seaweed farmers can grow a good crop with minimal infrastructure or disruption to the ocean environment. They’re not depleting existing seaweed beds; they’re just pruning a bit of reproductive tissue, then giving the spores something to land on so they can grow into seedlings, which then absorb nutrients already in the water and even create some healthy habitat before harvesting. “It’s pretty benign,” she says.
Chavoshi hopes PhyCo’s partnership with the Ecology Action Centre will be the first of many to come with small coastal and Indigenous communities, though she knows it takes time and trust to build equitable working relationships.
But like her beloved seaweed, Chavoshi is resilient.
As a first-generation Iranian Canadian and a queer woman of colour in science, she has faced her share of hurdles. “Being a female scientist, or even a female entrepreneur, people underestimate you, frequently . I find myself sometimes still doing this—justifying my expertise. Most people don’t expect me to know so much about the natural world, and seaweed in particular, or even business, for that matter. So I think that definitely comes with its challenges,” she says. “But it’s also an advantage, because when people underestimate you, it’s when you can surprise them the most.”
