he summer after my freshman year, when I was back in Bangkok, I visited my grandaunt, a professor at Kasetsart University in Thailand. She was talking about the project she was doing, researching the applications of seaweed and algae. I found this fascinating since I love anything to do with water. For example, I do sports like jet skiing, scuba diving, wakeboarding, and kite surfing. Because I was disgusted with the water and beach pollution, I started the Save Thai Ocean Project to raise awareness, organized beach cleanups and raised $2,260 for purchasing on-land and in-the-ocean cleanup devices.

My great-aunt explained that there are a lot of fish farms in Thailand, and most of the types of algae that grow in the space are considered invasive. So the farmers would try to bring out as much algae as they could and burn them, and by doing this, it would cause the emission of carbon dioxide gas.

Weeks after, she told me that the algae in the lab were running out and asked if I would like to go with the team to collect more in the actual fish farm, which turned out to be where they breed Betta fish. I was so excited because I remembered every time I flew back home, above in the sky, looking down, I always saw those rectangular-shaped blocks containing water. It was my opportunity to look at them closely and find out what they were. The day we went, it was sunny and 36 degrees celsius out, the perfect temperature to be in the water. As soon as we arrived, I jumped off my car and was about to run into the water; suddenly, one of the staff stopped me and told me not to let the water in my mouth because it was the pond where they feed fish, and there was no filtration, so the water is contaminated with fish wastes. Staring at the water’s surface, there were many floating tinted white layered liquids, which are what they called protein. I was now hesitant to move my body into the water, but I did. The algae were more than what I thought; they were everywhere. Every time my body moved, more algae stuck to my skin. We took about half a day to collect everything from a single pond. The amount was so overloaded that it wouldn’t fit in a single car. Then, luckily and thankfully, one of the farmers noticed what we were going to do and offered us his home as a space to wash the algae. It took us longer to clean than to pick up.

I was discussing with her and came up with a potential project of transforming the algae to paper, starting by testing the two common types: Chaetomorpha and Rhizoclonium. Every break I was back, I would visit the lab, research, and experiment on how the plant’s fiber could be turned into pulp and paper. We tried to minimize chemical use and found that hydrogen peroxide and sodium hydroxide were practical instead of the typical toxic and deadly chlorine gas.

In the end, we successfully made multiple paper sheets from those three types of algae. They were thicker than the typical paper, rough, and decorated with organics; however, yet, we had no idea how the algae papers could be used

Soon after, I realized that in my grandparent’s orchard, they had to use black plastic bags to wrap around the saplings to transport them from the nurseries to the crops. This sparked an idea for all of us as the algae paper can be decomposed within 2 or 3 months, which may allow the saplings to be planted with the paper bags.

Our Plans for the future are to spread the knowledge to the fishermen and farmers about demands for these invasive plants through workshops. In addition, they could apply the method of transforming algae into paper to develop many other valuable products like coffee cups, containers, etc. Our research team is also currently working on calculating the blue carbon credit per gram, which can be used as a marketing strategy to convince people to reduce their carbon footprint simply by compensating.