SEAWEED BRICKS

Mar 17, 2026

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When it dumps miles of seaweed on your beaches, make bricks.

Researchers say modern analytical techniques can now detect some of those molecular traces in fossil bones, revealing what animals ate and the environments they lived in — in some cases going back about 3 million years.

That’s what engineers in Quintana Roo, Mexico, are doing with the massive seasonal blooms of sargassum that wash ashore across the Caribbean. Instead of burning or burying the piles, researchers are turning the dried seaweed into structural bricks. The material can be sun-dried with little energy input and may offer useful strength and thermal performance for construction.

This video looks at how an environmental nuisance might become a useful building material.