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Early one morning in February 2019, marine biologist Pia Winberg was in her seaweed factory, on the NSW South Coast, checking on a piece of machinery called a molecular-filtration unit. Winberg, who was alone at the time, was working on a project in collaboration with Professor Fiona Wood, the burns specialist, to develop a gel, extracted from seaweed, that could be used in wound healing. “I remember being so excited, because it was the first batch that we had done,” she tells me.
The filtration unit was designed to separate and purify molecules in the seaweed extract by pumping it through a series of membranes at high pressure. Powering the pump, sitting almost at ground-level, was a drive shaft spinning at 2000 revolutions per minute. The drive shaft was encased in a metal housing, separated from the pump by a tiny gap, just two millimetres wide. It was a powerful piece of equipment, but Winberg had operated it many times before. She was also wearing a safety cap, goggles and a hair-net.
At some stage – Winberg is blurry on the details – she went to switch off the pump by turning a valve. The knob on the end of the handle popped off and rolled under the drive shaft. She got down on her hands and knees and reached to retrieve it. Somehow, her hair got sucked into the metal housing and wrapped around the drive shaft. It tore off the back of her scalp, a circle of skin 20 centimetres in diameter, roughly the size of a dessert plate, exposing the skull beneath.
“My memory stopped,” she recalls now. “The next thing I know I’m on my knees and I’m frustrated because my hair feels like it’s tangled in something, like coiled in a hairbrush. Then I looked at my hands and I went, ‘Why are my hands red?’ They were just covered in blood.”
Fortunately, the drive shaft had stopped spinning. Getting to her feet, Winberg extracted her scalp from the machine and began walking with it, in her hand, some 80 metres to the front of the industrial estate where she had an office. There, she asked one of her staff to call an ambulance. “The strange thing is that there was no pain,” she says.
Winberg and her detached scalp, now in a bag of ice, were then flown by helicopter to St George Hospital in Sydney, where she was rushed into surgery. “They tried to reattach the scalp but there had been too much -damage to the blood vessels,” says Winberg. Instead, over the course of the next 18 months, doctors slowly stretched the skin on the left side of her head to the point where it could be pulled across and stapled over the injury, like a tarpaulin on a damaged roof.
Curiously, the scalping left her with no trauma. Indeed, Winberg saw it as a unique opportunity for some R&D. “Every morning and night, I put my seaweed moisturiser on my head,” she tells me. “It helped minimise the scarring.”
The accident could easily have killed her: Winberg lost 2.5 litres of blood, which is at the outer limit of survivability. The fact she didn’t die is fortunate, not only for her and her family, but for you, me and the planet, because today Winberg is, at the age of 55, one of the world’s leading seaweed scientists. She understands more about seaweeds than almost anyone in Australia, from their molecular make-up to their sex lives and DNA.
But there is one very special seaweed that she knows better than all the others. It’s a seaweed, unique to Australia, that holds almost alchemic promise to address climate change while becoming a sustainable food source and cutting-edge biomedical aid. It is a seaweed that has absorbed virtually every waking moment of Winberg’s life for the past 15 years; the seaweed she was working on the day she almost died. She calls it species 84.
FOR THE sake of ease, I’d like to be able to give Winberg a label. But to borrow from Walt Whitman, she contains multitudes: she is a marine scientist, a seaweed farmer, an academic and entrepreneur, an environmental activist and purveyor of high-end cosmetics and boutique kombucha. She has been called both a naive hippie and a commercial sellout. The late science journalist and presenter Michael Mosley lauded her research. The ABC named her one of Australia’s top scientists. “I haven’t come across someone like her, and I’ve spoken to lots of people in this space,” says Professor Gordon Wallace, director of the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute at the University of Wollongong.
Today, however, she’s essentially my tour guide. It’s a nippy morning and Winberg is driving me up the Princes Highway, winding through remnant rainforest in Conjola National Park en route to her seaweed nursery and processing plant. Originally from Sweden, Winberg is tall and lean, with eyes a shade of blue rarely seen outside the Nordic circle and a long, plaited ponytail. She wears a headscarf over the site of her injury, though more out of habit than necessity. “I actually have hair where the scalping happened,” she tells me. “But I started wearing a scarf after the accident, and it’s really low-maintenance. No more blow-dries!”
The nursery, which is in a large warehouse on a light industrial estate, does more than grow seaweed. There is a small laboratory here, with microscopes on benches and cupboards full of chemicals and, at the rear of the facility, a processing area with a series of steel vats, repurposed from a winery, that Winberg uses to extract and purify her -seaweed gel. The nursery itself is a small, temperature-controlled space where the -seaweed is cultured from a single cell in Petri dishes and glass beakers.
Species 84 isn’t the leathery kelp you see at the beach. It’s an algae: small globs of dark green mush. As the globs grow bigger, they are transferred into plastic tubs a metre high and a metre wide. The water in the tubs is mossy-green and vaguely swampy: fed with oxygen via thin black tubes, it swirls about, burbling and burping like the witches’ brew in Macbeth. The seaweed grows at a fearsome rate, tripling its weight each week. When it’s harvested, it comes out in stringy sheets, like matted hair, and is iridescent green.
But it’s what it eats – nitrogen and CO2 – that really sets it apart. “Dissolved nitrogen and CO2 are killing the oceans,” Winberg explains. “They cause algal blooms, acidification and deoxygenation.”
The main sources of excess nitrogen in the ocean are agricultural run-off, sewage and food waste. Nitrogen fertilisers are thought to be the main cause of damage to the Great Barrier Reef and a major contributor to the algal blooms off the coast of Adelaide. In Tasmania, dissolved nitrogen from fish faeces at salmon farms is threatening wildlife and creating dead zones at Macquarie Harbour. Excess CO2, meanwhile, is the main driver of ocean acidification, which affects marine species’ reproduction cycles and disrupts the food chain. Acidification has been called “the evil twin of climate change” since, being underwater, its effects go largely unnoticed.
Seaweed counteracts these processes. It naturally absorbs nitrogen and turns it into protein, including, for example, the nori that comes with your sushi. At the same time, it takes CO2 out of the water and turns it into oxygen, just as land plants do when they photosynthesise. A 2013 study by the Yellow Sea Fisheries Research Institute, in China, showed that farms of large brown kelp decreased acidification in Sanggou Bay, an aquaculture hub on the Shandong Peninsula. And research published by Aarhus University for the Danish Centre of Environment and Energy in 2025 found that, in one fjord, offshore kelp farming removed 102 kilograms of nitrate from the water – the equivalent of 200 to 300 kilograms of nitrogen fertiliser – per hectare, per year.
The implications are profound. Winberg believes the Baltic Sea, deoxygenated for decades by forestry and agriculture, could be largely remediated with seaweed. According to scientists at the University of California, seaweed farms could also help fix the US Gulf of Mexico, large parts of which are dead in depths of less than a metre. Once harvested, the seaweed can be used as fertiliser or food. (Seaweed can also be turned into biofuel, but the process is not yet cost-effective.) Seaweeds could further reduce emissions if they replace more carbon-intensive products such as insulation, or act as natural binding agents with cement.
SEAWEED IS Winberg’s obsession, but she came to it in a roundabout way. Born in Stockholm in 1970, she moved to Australia at the age of four when her father, Lars, got work in Sydney as a telecommunications -engineer. Winberg attended Sydney Girls High, a selective school in the eastern suburbs. On the surface, all appeared well: on weekends the family would go to the beach, where Pia would play for hours in the rockpools, transfixed by the periwinkles and starfish.
“But my father was a difficult person,” Winberg tells me at her home, a two-storey 1980s weatherboard in Narrawallee, four hours’ drive south of Sydney. “He was the life of the party, very fun and jovial in public, but in private he was really good at putting his kids down and saying they were dirt and making you feel bad.”
Growing up in Sydney, Winberg pined for an idealised Sweden. “I wanted to find where I came from,” she says. After she graduated, she used money she had saved up to go back. “I really embraced it; I loved the snow and the cold.” In 1990, she got a job operating a T-bar lift at the ski resort at Hundfjället, near the border with Norway. The following year, she started a degree in marine geosciences at the University of Stockholm. The course focused on global systems: the planetary flow of nutrients and molecules, and the interconnectedness of the marine environment. “They are good in Sweden at linking all the sciences together to provide a broader understanding,” she explains. “That’s where ideas like sustainability and ecological footprints come from.”
In Stockholm, Winberg began dating a fellow student, Anders Auer, a former professional snowboarder whom she had met briefly at Hundfjället. “Pia was always very motivated and focused,” says Auer, who was studying economics and statistics. “She was there to learn deeply, not just get a degree and a job.” (Thirty-four years later, the couple are still together, and have two adult daughters.)
After finishing her degree in 1996, Winberg began a master’s in marine systems ecology. “It was the period of the Blue Revolution, when aquaculture was going to save the world,” she says. “But they did it so badly, and it damaged so many ecosystems.” Sri Lanka, for instance, had invested heavily in prawn farming and fared particularly badly. “They just shovelled down mangroves, built lots of prawn farms and released all the effluent into the coastal ecosystem. That water, which was full of nitrogen, was then pumped back in to keep the prawn farms running. It’s like plumbing your toilet to the kitchen sink.” Many prawn farms became diseased. “The industry was killing itself.”
In 1996, Winberg went to Sri Lanka to research possible solutions, including at a trial farm near Puttalam Lagoon, north of the capital, Colombo. Here, the fishermen had implemented a permaculture system involving a series of ponds. “The wastewater went into a pond where it was eaten by milk fish and tilapia. The water then flowed into a mussel pond, where the mussels ate up the finer particles, and then it flowed into a seaweed pond, where the seaweed took up the dissolved nutrients.”
The system, called integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA), seemed to be working. “The seaweed absorbed the nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon dioxide, and reoxygenated the water, which you could then put back to the prawns.” Seaweed, she realised, was the solution. “It was the final point, the end of the line. It was the one thing that took all the waste away and turned it into food.”
BECAUSE IT grows underwater, seaweed goes largely unnoticed unless, of course, it’s washed up on the beach, in which case most people tend to avoid it. But seaweed is prolific. There are three main types – red, brown and green – and 12,000 species worldwide, from the squishy Leathesia difformis, which resembles nothing so much as a deliquescing mandarin, to undulant kelp forests thousands of kilometres long.
Seaweed is old: one green seaweed species is the ancestor of all land plants; its fossilised remains date back one billion years. It can also be highly nutritious: humans have eaten seaweed for thousands of years, particularly in Asia, where it’s valued for its fibre, iodine and anti-inflammatory properties. In 2025, the global seaweed industry was valued at $US19.79 billion (about $28 billion), according to market research company Fortune Business Insights.
After Sri Lanka, seaweed became a fascination for Winberg, but she was unsure how to implement it in a real-world setting. Then, in 2001, seeking respite from Sweden’s freezing winters, she, Auer, and their baby daughter, Saskia, moved to Australia. They bought a house in Narrawallee, which they had visited on holiday, years before, and fallen in love with. The beach was long and untrammelled and backed by towering gums; many of the houses were fibro shacks. The nearest town, Ulladulla, was small and sleepy, with a fishing industry that had been founded in the 1930s by Italian immigrants.
Today, Narrawallee and its neighbouring beach, Mollymook, are popular tourist spots; Mollymook gained renown, in 2009, when celebrity chef Rick Stein launched a restaurant here. “But when Pia and I first met here in the early 2000s, the area was much less bougie,” says Amanda Findley, a local teacher and long-time friend of Winberg. “It was the kind of place where our kids knew someone in every street.”
Winberg and Auer had arrived at an interesting time. The NSW government, in an effort to address overfishing, had just established a protected marine park in nearby Jervis Bay. Not surprisingly, the fishermen in Ulladulla saw it as a threat to their way of life. Winberg, who had been awarded a PhD scholarship at the University of Wollongong to study the park’s rollout, was caught in the middle. “The meetings between fishermen and marine park representatives got pretty aggressive,” she says. “I even heard that one [senior marine park employee] got a death threat.”
She believed the town needed to look at transitional industries. “The fishermen needed alternatives,” she says. In 2008, she proposed repurposing the town’s decommissioned sewage works – more than four -hectares of abandoned tanks and ponds – into a marine technology park to cultivate fish and seaweed. “It was a revelation for the locals,” says Findley, who was then serving on the local council. “This is a four-generation fishing town, and along comes this woman, a total brainbox, who was like, ‘You don’t have to do that any more! We can do aquaculture here!’ ”
Winberg made a presentation to the council, outlining the project’s potential to create jobs and meet the emerging market in seaweed products. The next day, however, a prominent Liberal councillor suggested that Winberg’s proposal was actually part of a Greens party “anti-sports” agenda. “It was bizarre,” says Winberg. “They said I was trying to take land away from the local AFL club, which had wanted to use the site for a football field. But we could have had an aquaculture park and a football field.”
“It was a total beat-up,” Findley says. “There were a couple [of local politicians] doing whatever it took to get re-elected and get their faces on the front pages of The Milton Ulladulla Times. They thought they could get the votes of the local football people by whipping them up over nothing.”
In the end, the proposal was rejected. “I was naive about how politics really worked,” says Winberg. Today, the old treatment plant remains undeveloped. “Anders and I walked up there the other day. It’s a scary minefield of graffiti, all overgrown. It’s tragic.”
SWEDEN IS a small country, with a population of just 10.5 million. But it has produced some famously big thinkers. Alfred Nobel (of Nobel Prize fame) was Swedish. So was Anders Celsius, inventor of the temperature scale. It was a Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, who first recognised, in research published in 1896, that carbon dioxide traps heat in the earth’s atmosphere – the phenomenon now called the greenhouse effect. “I sat in the same lecture hall at Stockholm University where Arrhenius taught as a professor in the 1800s,” says Winberg.
Winberg is still very Swedish. Many of the books in her home are in Swedish, and the downstairs bathroom includes a proper Swedish sauna. She moves with grace and calm, and has a uniquely Scandinavian -disposition for problem-solving. “Pia has a good understanding about the big picture with respect to challenges that humanity is facing,” says Associate Professor Max Troell, program director of the aquaculture and -sustainable seafood program at the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics in Stockholm. “And she is very committed to making her work part of the solutions.”
In 2009, the University of Wollongong established a marine and freshwater research centre in Nowra and made Winberg the director. She and her team of PhD students began a comprehensive stocktake of Australian seaweeds, analysing their DNA and nutritional profiles, and their ability to absorb nitrogen. It was painstaking work: there are 1500 seaweeds native to Australia – 14,000 if you include all the algaes – some of which are so closely related that even experts in particular species have a hard time telling them apart. But one species stood out: a type of sea lettuce, unique to Australia, that grew in the intertidal zone, usually in temperate waters, similar to what fishermen sometimes call “green weed”.
“It was exceptional,” she says. “It had good reproduction control, good B¹². It was robust and easy to handle, and its shape gave it more surface area, which maximised nitrogen uptake, which made it really high in protein. It also grew extremely fast: twice to 10 times faster than most other seaweeds.” It was the 84th seaweed the team had analysed, so they called it “species 84”.
Winberg’s university work involved other projects: she collaborated on sustainability with local oyster growers and with the abalone industry in Tasmania. But she also had her own ideas, which she longed to put into -practice. So in 2014, she left the university and started her own company, Venus Shell Systems. “Ideas have to have commercial viability, otherwise you’re living on research grants. I wanted to make ecological solutions happen through economic systems.”
Winberg began employing some of her former students to develop different opportunities, most of which revolved around species 84. The “magic seaweed’, as she describes it, had extraordinary potential as a food source, thanks to its protein, fibre and omega-3 fatty acids. (One of her products, an additive called PhycoTein, won the award for the most innovative protein food source at the International Food Expo in London in 2024.) The efficiency with which species 84 produces protein means that it’s carbon negative: for every kilogram of seaweed produced, it uses up 1.5 kilograms of CO2. This means that it has the potential to displace more carbon-intensive food sources, such as wheat and meat production.
As Winberg continued analysing species 84, other uses began to emerge. In 2016, she started working with Gordon Wallace, executive research director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science, on a gel she had extracted from the seaweed. Their research showed that the gel contained a molecule that mimicked hyaluronic acid, a naturally occurring sugar that has an extraordinary ability to retain moisture. “It meant that the seaweed molecules interacted very effectively with living skin cells,” Wallace tells me. “They stop the shrinkage of the wound, and so mitigate scarring.” The gel could also be used as a bio-ink – a fluid substance infused with live cells – and moulded by a 3-D printer to fit the shape of virtually any wound. “It’s unusual to get a molecule that ticks all those boxes,” he explains. “In fact, we don’t have another one.”
In 2023, Winberg, Wallace and the burns specialist Fiona Wood managed to recreate human skin tissue in a lab at the University of Wollongong. Next year, they are set to begin trials aimed at regenerating fully functional skin on humans.
ALL THIS cost money. Winberg mortgaged her house to fund the research with Wallace. Fortunately, the seaweed fed on free ingredients, including nitrogen-laden waste from a nearby cheese factory and a mushroom farm. (Winberg later built a pilot farm beside the Manildra food refinery in Nowra. “Manildra makes E10 fuel and most of the gin in the southern hemisphere. That process produces natural carbon dioxide, which they let us use.“) But the hard infrastructure – the pipes, pumps, and tanks – cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Winberg estimates she has so far spent $3 million just on equipment.
To fund the operation, she began selling seaweed cosmetics and food products. (The seaweed is dried, milled and added to foods such as pasta and granola.) But she also engaged investors, both here and overseas. The money kept her afloat but it put her in a difficult position. “Science is all about not knowing and finding out,” she says, “but corporates want certainty and fast rewards.” She found herself in an awkward position. “My academic colleagues thought I’d gone to the dark side for going into business and the businesspeople thought I was a geek who didn’t understand business.”
Moreover, dealing with investors was unexpectedly time-consuming. “We would go out to dinner with them,” Anders says. “I’d go, ‘No, that guy is dodgy’ or ‘No, he seems OK.’ ” Some were crooks, others were pretenders. “One guy said he wanted to fund me because he could drive around in a green Kombi and tell everyone he was a seaweed farmer,” Winberg says. “And this was a grown man.”
In the end, she turned to crowdfunding. The company has done three crowd equity raises since 2023, and now has 1550 shareholders, most of whom seem motivated less by the money than by the values. “I wanted to back Pia because I believe in what she’s doing,” says local woman Lisa Selbie, who teaches biotech at Johns Hopkins University and at the University of NSW. “It’s about sustainability, the environment, and science.”
The focus now is on building scale. In March 2024, Winberg partnered with marine services company SeaO2 Nanno to build an inland seaweed farm near Ballina, on the NSW North Coast. The farm, which is the first of its kind in Australia, uses six cultivation pools, some as long as 300 metres. The seaweed is fed on nitrogen waste from a nearby sugar refinery; in time, it will pump run-off from neighbouring farms, including from the local macadamia industry, directly into the ponds. “It’s better to intercept the waste water before it goes into the ocean,” she explains. “By mid-2026, the farm should be producing 300 tonnes of the seaweed a year, and using up 450 tonnes of CO2.”
Ultimately, Winberg would like to see seaweed farms up and down the coast, like lungs for the ocean, sucking up nitrogen and CO2 and pumping out oxygen and clean water. “And it doesn’t have to be my seaweed. We are just one model of a seaweed farm. We’re viable, but others can be, too.”
Winberg likes to tell people that seaweed can save the world. “They go, ‘Yeah, right.’ But it can happen,” she says. “It’ll just take time.”
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