The Kaly Group, an investment group focused on sustainable aquaculture initiatives, said on 27 April, it has begun the licensing processes for a commercial-scale kelp farm in Loch Bay, off Scotland's Isle of Skye.
The project has the backing of Tricapital Angel Investors and the Scottish Enterprise, it said in a press release. The Scottish Institute for Marine Sciences and the James Hutton Institute will partner with the Kaly Group to develop best practices to ensure the projects creates environmental benefits.
"Kaly aims to add significant capacity to the Scottish seaweed industry in the next few years. As well as significant economic benefits, seaweed farming can play a huge part in pushing back against climate change by absorbing carbon, regenerating marine ecosystems, creating biofuel and renewable plastics as well as generating marine protein,” Tricapital Managing Partner Moray Martin said.
The Kaly Group is a backer of marine and environmental projects, including seaweed farming. It aims to become the leading developer and advocate for inclusion of marine ingredients in the United Kingdom's emerging natural products market.
“To successfully develop natural capital in the marine environment, we understand there is a larger exercise of laying the ‘plumbing’ for entirely new value chains and markets. Starting a seaweed farm or an oyster bed and calling it a day was never an option for us. Kaly is creating not only the physical infrastructure to enable a certain degree of scale in the production of farmed seaweed, but also the market mechanisms and governance structures that will allow for UK farmed seaweed to be widely accessible to consumers in various useful products and priced according to its inherent value to people and planet," Kaly Group Co-Founder Daniel Hillman said.
Photo courtesy of Kaly Group
