Please tell me what is wrong my my thinking here. Thanks

[Nate57]

Sorry to butt into your forum here but I would very much appreciate your expertise. As many of you may be aware we have been experiencing an onslaught of sarghassum seaweed in the Caribbean in recent years. I'll leave dispute of the causes alone and cut to the chase. My thoughts on a practical effort to slow this problem is to shred it before it reaches shore or shred what is already at our shores and pump the slurry a hundred meters offshore to allow lateral currents to disperse it. There are all sorts of shredders available from seaweed shredders to ones capable of shredding a VW bus. The ones that seem perfect for this application however are what you call grinders in your industry. My thought is to funnel this seaweed into something like a 12 inch sewage grinder followed by a macerator pump to send it off through a vinyl tube a hundred meters offshore. I hope I'm explaining the idea well enough. Any thoughts on this would be very appreciated. Thanks in advance

 

[gerhardl]

First: I am no expert in this area.

Secondly: finding an effective method of mechanically a shedding,grinding, pumping and returning to the ocean would be a fairly simple mechanically soluble problem. If this is sensible economically in any scale (locally for single beaches or widespread) is another question.

Then comes the question that you have parked on the sideline: will this in any way have an impact on the environmental system that has caused an increased amount of sarghassum seaweed? Will the impact in case be limited (local or in time), or accelerate negative processes?

Some seaweeds have been used traditionally as earth fertilizer. Seaweed-types have also, and is presently, used as edible mineral additives for animal foods and health additives for humans. Other possible alternatives?

There is, around the world, a growing interest in ocean research. I suggest you try to address your question to an ocean research center.

(As an example, Norway, with only 5 million people, but a long coastline to North Atlantic and Arctic waters and an extended offshore and aquaculture industry, have an Ocean research facility with 2000 direct employees, one of the largest in Europe. Probably not the right one for you.)

 

[Nate57]

Thanks for your input Gerhardl

 

[amlinerrichard]

Look for a couple hog or beef farms near your area. check with them to see if they would take the seaweed. then they can supply the trailer? to haul it back to there feedlot. Should be cheaper to drag the weeds to a spot that they can get to. You may have to help with the loading.

 

[bimr]

The scale of this problem is so immense that you will not be able to implement this type of solution in a cost-effective manner.