Excerpted from “Waking the Sleeping Giant: Unlocking the Hidden Power of Business to Save the Planet” by Jake Kheel
Ten years ago, in 2011, large waves of sargassum seaweed started showing up on the beaches of Mexico and the Caribbean. Sargassum forms masses of floating, reddish, stringy seaweed pushed along by ocean currents and waves. If it finds the right landing spot, it washes up onshore. This was the first time we had ever seen sargassum seaweed in such large quantities in the Dominican Republic and it wreaked havoc on our beaches. With each incoming wave of seaweed, the beaches became immersed in chest-high mounds of seaweed. Small armies of gardeners were deployed to remove the seaweed manually with rakes and wheelbarrows.
At first, it was an annoying but manageable problem. The beach cleaner teams simply scooped up the sargassum along with everything else that showed up on the beach including seagrass leaves, the occasional tree branch, and plastic. The volume of seaweed soon increased, however, washing up faster than our beachcombers could clean it up. Incoming seaweed stacked up behind already accumulated mountains of beached seaweed. The masses of material extended from shore back out to sea, making it challenging to even reach the water. Visitors had to climb over and wade through fresh waist-deep seaweed piles to get to the ocean. We had a serious problem.
We deployed mechanical beach-cleaning tractors to zigzag up and down the beach and rake up the sargassum. But it kept coming, like a nautical version of the Blob. We tried using front-loaders and tractors to scoop it off the beach, but using heavy equipment on a beach only makes the problem worse. The buckets of the front-loaders shovel up the seaweed, taking the beach sand with them. With heavy equipment driving all over the beach, the sand was compacted and filled with tire tracks. Not only did our visitors want no part of these beach-turned-construction-sites, we were at risk of inflicting serious erosion on our own pristine beaches.
The sargassum wasn’t just a nuisance for beachgoers. The longer the seaweed mounds stay on the beach, the smellier it gets. Shrimp, fish, and small organisms happily stowed away within the seaweed mats in open water weren’t built for dry land. When the whole floating ensemble hit the beach, the creatures dried up and died. The sargassum went from an eyesore into a rotten, decaying mess that stunk up the entire resort.
Our homeowners began to chime in, joining a growing chorus of complaints from hotel guests. They were understandably upset that their idyllic Caribbean vacation had been contaminated by seaweed. They didn’t keep quiet about it either, peppering us with nasty reviews and harsh descriptions of ruined vacations on social media. We fielded equally loud complaints from our hotel managers, real estate vendors, and anyone else who had to look at beaches piled with rotting seaweed or torn apart by tractors. It was a complain-a-thon and we were pulling our hair out. We had no answer.
Worse, the problem cost us a fortune. Renting heavy equipment is expensive and the erosion it caused would eventually require a beach nourishment solution that wasn’t likely to be cheap either. The impact on the hotels was also significant, with angry guests demanding refunds and even cancellations. If the cost to clean up sargassum wasn’t bad enough, the damage to our reputation was becoming equally pricey.
Punta Cana wasn’t the only destination suffering from sargassum. Islands throughout the Caribbean and the Cancún coast in Mexico were under siege by an onslaught of seaweed-related bad press. Articles in The Washington Post, The New York Times, New York Magazine and Smithsonian documented the problem in Mexico and several Lesser Antilles islands. Journalists tried to determine the cause of the seaweed invasion, drawing even more negative attention to the crisis and further damaging tourism. The “Monster Seaweed” as it was known in Mexico had quickly become the greatest single threat to the Mexican tourism economy, forcing the government to declare a national emergency.
The Secret Life of Sargassum
Theories attempting to explain the sargassum landings are almost as abundant as the seaweed itself. According to different sources, the recent presence of sargassum in Mexico and the Caribbean could be caused by global climate change, changing ocean currents, El Niño weather events, Saharan dust clouds, nutrients from Brazilian-Amazon farms, or dispersants used during the British Petroleum oil spill cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico. Each idea shares elements of modern science fiction but all are within the realm of scientific plausibility. In 2011, no one seemed to agree whether this was an exceptional event or if it represented a new paradigm shift in the region.
It was also not entirely clear where the seaweed originates in the first place. Large concentrations of sargassum seaweed occur naturally off the coast of South America, West Africa, and in its namesake Sargasso Sea off the Atlantic coast of the United States. Scientists have a general idea where the biggest seaweed patches form and grow, but they still had no clue where the point of origin lies or why its movement had changed to include the Caribbean.
Ironically, when contained in its normal range, sargassum is a unique and fascinating floating habitat with enormous economic, ecological, and even global benefits. At two million square miles, the Sargasso Sea is roughly the size of the United States and is an immensely productive habitat, serving as home and spawning area to several hundred invertebrates, fish, sea turtles, numerous migratory birds, and marine mammals such as sperm and humpback whales. The Sargasso plays a major role in commercial fisheries around the world as well, and in 2014, the Sargasso Sea Commission was formed to protect the sea as vital habitat of global importance.
The Sargasso Sea is also suspected to be an important player in retaining global carbon emissions. Sargassum is a carbon sink that may be a major factor in controlling the concentration of carbon dioxide in the lower atmosphere, impacting the global climate system. The floating mats of seaweed act as a giant carbon sponge, taking heat-trapping gases out of the atmosphere and storing them as seaweed. As human-caused climate change accelerates, sargassum could help humans combat climate change.
Nonetheless, when your CEO can’t sleep at night due to bad press, messy beaches and exploding costs, sargassum is hard to love. I can admire sargassum’s unique ecological contributions, provided it stays far from Punta Cana and doesn’t ruin anyone’s vacation.
As bad as 2011 came to be, it turned out that it was a light year for seaweed. The seaweed lasted a few months through the summer and then abruptly stopped arriving and was quickly forgotten. Yet if we thought this was a one-time problem, we were sorely mistaken. In 2013, 2015, and later in 2018, the arrival of sargassum in the Caribbean and Mexico got progressively worse, growing exponentially in size each year, while continuing for longer periods of time. The sargassum events were no longer a summertime phenomenon; the sargassum season of 2018 was an estimated three to five times greater than the initial landings in 2011 and lasted nearly the entire year. Scientists now believe a new Sargasso Sea has formed adjacent to the Caribbean and is here to stay.
Seaweed Battleground
The first few years we struggled through each seaweed season with our hands tied behind our backs. We were losing the battle badly. In 2013 we decided to take the fight directly to the sargassum, in the water.
I helped put together a crack team of in-house seaweed experts from Grupo Puntacana including our maintenance, landscaping, and engineering departments. We concluded that if we allowed the seaweed to reach the beach, we had lost the battle. Cleanup is expensive, the beach is unusable, our guests are unhappy, and ultimately the beach suffers erosion. If we waited for the beaches to get swamped in seaweed, we were done for.
What if, however, we could install floating barriers to deflect the seaweed offshore so it never made it to the beach? Desperate for a solution, the resort gave us a limited budget and some leeway to experiment. We imported several different models of commercial floating booms used to contain oil spills. The barriers helped but they weren’t designed to deal with heavy seaweed and turned out to be flimsy under changing wind and waves. The sargassum washed over the top or forced the booms to flap upwards like a flag in a gale. The seaweed seemed to laugh at the barriers as it flowed by.
Our seaweed brain trust realized that if no barrier on the market would meet our specific anti-seaweed purpose — we had to make our own. We huddled in the maintenance department spit-balling barrier ideas on a whiteboard. The material had to be cheap and relatively accessible in our region. It had to float but couldn’t capsize or collapse under the weight of the seaweed. It had to resist harsh seas, waves, and wind but couldn’t be so rigid that it would smash to pieces. We had to figure out how to anchor the barriers to the ocean floor and deploy them in front of long stretches of coast. Finally, the barriers couldn’t entangle turtles or other marine life. We needed a breakthrough, bad.
After our brainstorm, we launched our first prototype consisting of two parallel PVC tubes and a network of smaller tubes supporting plastic netting hanging six to ten inches below the water surface. The barriers looked like a makeshift, DIY catamaran, but they proved to be stable and highly effective in repelling seaweed.
We had hit on a solution, now we had to deploy it at scale. After some experimentation, we determined the correct angle to deploy the barriers to block the seaweed, yet still allow it to drift naturally down the coast with the current. Once the sargassum collided with our barriers, it would eventually get pushed back into the natural currents without ever landing on the beach.
With a design in place and a concept for how to position the barriers, we prioritized beaches. With over six miles of coast, we knew it would be too expensive and difficult to deploy barriers along the front of the entire resort. Additionally, a good part of that coast was rough, rocky shore or golf holes. We concluded if it wasn’t a beach, it didn’t need a barrier. In addition, not all beaches were affected in the same way. Some got hit much worse than others. We mapped out priority beaches and got started.
Our maintenance warehouse soon became a seaweed barrier factory. In a matter of weeks, we had effectively protected close to a mile and a half of beach, with the barriers deflecting nearly ninety percent of the seaweed. The beaches could be cleaned manually or with beach-cleaning machines.
However, with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of floating barriers positioned offshore, the barriers couldn’t just stay in the water unattended. We needed a strategy to maintain them. The plastic mesh would break, the PVC joints would come apart, and eventually the ocean conditions would necessitate replacing barriers.
Once again we turned to the fishermen. We recruited ARSEMAR, the association of ex-fishermen, to patrol the coast to fix and reposition broken barriers. We gave them spare parts to replace broken pieces, clean the netting, and change sections of damaged barrier. They used their own fishing boats and we provided gas. In addition to saving us the complicated task of buying a boat and assembling a crew, this approach allowed us to hire more local fishermen. Once again, their unique skillset as fishermen dovetailed perfectly with maintaining floating barriers. The fishermen were handy at solving problems at sea. In addition to restoring corals, the ex-fishermen became part of our Anti-Sargassum Team.
A Seaweed Clearinghouse
The more proactive we were about confronting seaweed, the more others noticed. Without realizing it, we had become leaders in the anti-seaweed space. Resorts, companies, and Caribbean governments sought our advice. We advised the Dominican government on the best strategies for hotels and resorts and eventually formed part of the Presidential Commission on Sargassum Seaweed. The traditionally aloof Dominican government even began considering funding efforts to protect Punta Cana area beaches with our direct input.
Grupo Puntacana soon became a clearinghouse for any company, scientist, or university that had a proposed solution to the seaweed challenge. We received dozens of proposals, visits, and inquiries from people selling barriers, collection equipment, compost systems, biodigestors, and manufacturers of bioplastics. Having successfully protected our priority beaches from seaweed, we began working with partners to harvest it and convert it into something productive.
In 2018, the volume of invading seaweed once again broke all records. Like the rest of the Caribbean, we struggled through the summer and spent a fortune confronting the problem, but our barriers managed to help save the tourism season. Our proactivity quieted a lot of the complaints and the beach has rebounded faster and better than expected. Today we have close to eight kilometers of barriers installed and a contract with a new company to harvest the seaweed off the barriers with a specially designed floating harvesting barge.
As it is with much of life and in business, you often learn the most about yourself during crisis. From the trauma and stress of the seaweed battle (and the associated “Post Sargassum Stress Disorder”) we learned some very important lessons.
The most eye-opening is that rapid environmental change is the new normal. We don’t know for sure what caused the seaweed scourge. Potentially, it is related to climate change or large-scale, human-induced environmental changes occurring around the world. Regardless, no self-respecting scientist would have predicted that a second Sargasso Sea would form in the Caribbean Sea in less than a decade. Our planet is changing quickly and whether it is seaweed, storms, algae blooms, red tides, or something else, its oceans are changing too. If we want to have coastal tourism in the future, we must learn to innovate and adapt to these drastic changes.
Innovation, in turn, creates competitive advantages. The country, destination, or company that can adapt to rapid environmental change most efficiently and effectively will have a competitive advantage over others that don’t. Punta Cana is competing with other tourism destinations like Jamaica, Mexico, and Aruba. The first destination that can say they have sargassum seaweed under control will be the winner of this particular battle. Though we can’t say we have defeated sargassum, we are at least five years ahead of everyone else in the region in research and development, and undoubtedly better prepared and equipped to confront this challenge.
We also learned that being an innovator often attracts other innovators. If you are creative and groundbreaking in your approach to different challenges, you will likely draw other pioneers looking to solve problems. Whether we wanted to or not, Grupo Puntacana has become a magnet for seaweed contraptions and solutions, from the outlandish to the useful. Sorting through all the proposals can be time-consuming, but it also can be valuable exposure for a company. Having smart people give you good ideas for free is often worth its weight in boardroom meetings.
Ironically, private companies are uniquely equipped to confront new environmental challenges like rampant seaweed. Companies can respond quickly and with vast stores of creativity. In our case, the Dominican government realized the tourism industry was threatened by seaweed seven years after the problem had started! Our company already had a functioning seaweed response team, investment in R&D, and had been experimenting with solutions long before. By 2014, long before the government even considered the sargassum situation, I had already attended the International Sargassum Symposium in Texas, seeking information and ideas.
Today, the seaweed keeps coming. It hits new beaches and seems to evolve new ways to get through the barriers. Yet we continually match the seaweed’s evolving strategies by adapting and evolving, as well. We have turned down the volume of the crisis from a 10 to a manageable 4 or 5. Eventually, someone will uncover a product or use for the seaweed, but for now we still have tourists on our beaches. Our product is still the place.