By William Ysaguirre (Freelance Writer)
BELIZE CITY, Mon. Sept. 1, 2025
The sargassum which has been considered a smelly scourge clogging up our beaches and threatening marine life, since it began floating in from the Atlantic in 2015, is also increasingly being viewed as potentially an important marine resource of some value for industrial applications.
Each resort and destination in Belize has been tackling the increasing presence of sargassum in their own way, and while the town councils in San Pedro and Caye Caulker began acquiring mechanical equipment to collect the sargassum from the beach, their first solution was to bury it as landfill. Their experience soon taught them that it was best to collect the sargassum at sea, before it lands on the beach; but this solution requires special barges with a conveyor belt system to pull the sargassum from the water and discharge it into the hold of the vessel, which carries a cost in fuel and manpower.
The Belize Fund for a Sustainable Future has awarded $250,000 in emergency grants to assist clean-up campaigns in Belizean waters. Belize Fund executive director, Leandra Cho-Ricketts, PhD, signed funding agreements with Linette Canto, director of the Belize Tourism Industry Association (BTIA), and Reynaldo Malik, director of the Belize Hotel Association in Belize City, on Thursday, August 28, with each association to receive $125,000 to assist with their clean-up efforts.
Sargassum has reached record levels throughout the Caribbean this year. Mexico reports collecting about 68,000 tons from its beaches so far, and their official estimate is that it could cost over $1 million to keep one kilometer of beach clean for a year.
Other countries of the Greater Caribbean, including island nations and coastal areas of Central America, along with Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia, have agreed on a regional plan of action to address the sargassum crisis at the Latin America and Caribbean Ministerial Meeting on Regional Climate Action in Mexico City last Tuesday, August 26. Sargassum is one of the region’s most urgent environmental and socioeconomic challenges, and the regional partners agreed on a circular economy approach to coordinate mechanisms for early warning, collection and sustainable use of this floating marine resource, to prevent it from clogging up our beaches.
“Sargassum blooms in the Greater Caribbean exceed 50 million tons, which means regional cooperation is not optional, it is the only way to turn sargassum from a threat into an opportunity,” declared Alicia Bárcena, Mexico’s minister for the Environment and Natural Resources.
The Mexican government has now defined sargassum to be a “fishery resource with development potential,” allowing for it to be harvested in open waters and for permits to be issued with technical supervision for industrial projects to process the seaweed. To this end, Mexico’s Agriculture and Rural Development Secretariat has updated the National Fisheries Charter, with a harvest limit of up to 945,000 tons for this year.
The charter cautions that collection methods must avoid damage to marine life, as the floating sargassum at sea supports a unique marine ecosystem which shelters various species, including mahi-mahi, tuna and jack, and that the harvest will require constant scientific monitoring for sustainable management.
Meanwhile, scientists have been trying to think of ways to use the floating mats of weed as a resource, as a construction material, as possibly a fertilizer or as a bio-fuel. Each solution comes with an attendant cost, to process the soggy, smelly mass into a usable raw material for an industrial process. The potential uses as raw material include animal feed, fertilizers, biofuels, bioplastics, bioremediation and water treatment, as well as the production of clothing and dyes after the sargassum is processed, and biomaterials for construction bricks.
Researchers have defined the causes of the sargassum scourge to be man-made, and have indicated that excess nutrients from agricultural run-off have spawned this runaway growth as a result of warming sea temperatures and other climate changes. In open water, it supports biodiversity, but it decomposes when washed ashore, creating environmental, economic and health hazards.
The sargassum phenomenon is a coupled ocean-atmosphere-biosphere system and is here to stay, declared Mexican oceanographer Julio Sheinbaum, who suggested that mechanisms to address this scourge should shift from reactive beach cleanups to preventive, science-based strategies. He spoke at a conference at Mexico’s National University, and proposed that satellite monitoring, ocean modeling and seasonal forecasts can help clean-up workers to anticipate and minimize its impacts, by predicting the arrival of sargassum rafts up to seven months in advance. He also proposed that workers find ways to use this resource sustainably, such as in biofuels and construction materials, adhering to strict conservation protocols.
