Sargassum — the foul-smelling brown seaweed — is washing up on Mexico’s Caribbean beaches in record volumes, with the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt surpassing 38 million tons in July 2025, a 40% increase over the previous record set just two years earlier.

Now, companies are trying to turn the crisis into an opportunity, collecting around 20,000 metric tons of sargassum per year along the Riviera Maya and processing it into agricultural biostimulants, a cosmetic emulsifier, and an experimental seaweed-based leather alternative.

Despite this ingenuity, sargassum blooms are expanding in both size and season, arriving as early as January now, and scientists warn that Atlantic current shifts linked to climate change could continue accelerating the crisis through 2050.

Find out how companies are fighting this threat and creating a more sustainable world by reading the full article here.