This comes from the December 2024 update sent to the project's supporters. By the end of 2023 we had a material, a lease on a small manufacturing space on Venables Street in Vancouver, and more questions than people. 2024 was the year the research spread out.
Perth showed that the fibre could be any seaweed
Much of the materials work moved to Perth, where director Ory Lavallee and engineer Chris Fisher carried on from the UBC team with support from the Western Australian government. They found a simpler and faster process with a slightly different formulation. They also showed that a composite made with sargassum, the seaweed that piles up on Caribbean and West African beaches, reached the same strength as kelp. For a material whose supply chain was its weakest link, that mattered.
The hinge-lock made the joint a turn instead of a push
At the same time the shape of the brick changed. Working with Brady Kirk and Xiaoyuan Geng on 3D design and printing, the team replaced the earlier tongue-and-bump lock with the hinge-lock. Bricks could be joined and separated with far less force and held more securely. In September 2024 the hinge-lock was declared final for patent purposes. Children took to it at once, which turned out to be a useful test.
A small grant brought the work home
Late in 2024 Canada's Ocean Supercluster awarded the project a $25,000 Ocean Startup grant to validate a new waterproofing strategy: one that does not require petrochemicals as an input and does not risk releasing microparticles into the sea. A team of UBC Materials Engineering students would run it in 2025 under two of the project's engineering advisors. That study is the next article.
Other threads of 2024
The year also brought three patent filings on kelp processing and farming, a pilot of advance "claims" on future bricks, grants from the Arbitrum Foundation and Elephant Room for the digital platform behind those claims, and a letter of intent with a coastal First Nation about a prototype floating building. The threads that continued are on the story page.