Comments by "Gaza is not Amalek" (@Ass_of_Amalek) on "How Bricks Made From Invasive Seaweed Clean Mexico's Beaches | World Wide Waste | Insider Business" video.

I'm sceptical of some of the claims here - I think if those houses really don't stink, it's only because the insides are heavily ventilated, and certainly they are too open for lower thermal conductivity of those bricks to be beneficial for temperature regulation (denser bricks would be better for summer daytime heat, as they would more actively coolthe indoor air against the effect of the ventilation). adding fibers to adobe bricks makes sense, and I suppose sargassum may be cheaper than other options. but if prolonged exposure is a health risk, then those workers have a problem, and I'm a little concerned about the inhabitants of the houses, too. what I find most interesting here is the tangential mention of the idea of using excessice sargassum growth for carbon sequestration. intuitively, that feels like the best carbon sequestration concept I have heard of. it would basically be assisting nature in forming new petroleum and gas deposits (far in the future), as the accumulation and failure to decompose of algae on the sea floor is exactly how the deposits we have today were formed.
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the vast majority of these videos are of silly little hipster projects that do little more than provide a few jobs, and sometimes inflated profits through successful deceptive marketing and donation drives. in most of them (not in the case of sargassum), what should be happening instead is state investment in the boring but extremely effective garbage solution that are garbage-burning power plants. it's very important that they use good exhaust filtering systems, but if they do, they enormously reduce the environmental and societal impact of garbage, and they produce plenty of electricity to finance their operation and trash collection and sorting. unlike the US, which still dumps a huge portion of garbage in landfills, most of central europe has managed to ban household waste from landfills (now mostly used for construction waste), by burning everything that can't be recycled (though there has been trickery with labelling stuff as recycleable in order to export it to asian countries where it just ended up in landfills). one of these videos where power plants are particularly obviously the correct solution is the one about the second hand clothes imported by ghana, much of which end up littering what would otherwise be tourist-friendly beaches. almost all clothes, whether cotton, synthetic or animal hair, are perfect fuel for garbage power plants, as they burn well and predictably reasonably cleanly. burning trash is not as marketable as recycling because it'sclear that it's destructive, but it often is the best way to handle the quantity of the problem at all. recycling projects just play around with a tiny portion of the problem, they are mostly incapable of solving anything.
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@valoronions well so far it's just an idea with apparently a couple of people working on it. it can only become a sensation if it's proven to be feasible at scale. there certainly are complex problems to solve, such as how to deposit (maybe bury, but that would balloon the energy requirement) the seaweed in such a way and in the right locations that it ends up staying there basically forever, or most of its carbon content does in some form. it may also be difficult to assess the amount of methane still produced by any anaerobic partial decomposition involved in the process - too much methane production has the potential of making the whole endeavour worse for the climatethanburning thestuff wouldhave been (making and burying biochar instead would then be ideal, as that only releases part of the carbon). but in principle, if much digging is not required, using sargassum sounds like a promising way to dramatically reduce energy requirements relative to most other carbon sequestration methods. it also seems very likely, based on its likely ease of mechanical handling because it's this uniform floating stuff, that it would require little work input to give the sargassum a carbon sequestration rate far greater than that of any fully natural ecosystem - it takes very particular circumstances for ecosystems to heavily sequester carbon by producing biomass that largely fails to decompose, such as fossil coal generation of the carboniferous caused by microorganisms not yet having evolved to digest lignin in wood, or bodies of water that were stagnant with an exceptionally salty layer at the bottom that prevented decomposition of falling biomass, or peat bogs which slowly grow thick layers of dead peat moss that is partially preserved by oxygen exclusion (and humic acid, I think). if the unusually large sargassum growth is the result of human-caused excessive fertilisation of the ocean, then removing the stuff from the nutrient circulation would likely be beneficial for the ocean ecosystem also. the decay of excessive biomas can damage aquatic ecosystems by depleting oxygen.
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@stephhhie17 I know
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