The Seaweed Resources of Italy

The attitude to seaweed in Italy is quite different from that in other countries. In fact, in Italy seaweed is considered as waste and a problem rather than a resource. As lagoons and enclosed basins with lagoonar characteristics are periodically affected by distrophic phenomena caused by seaweed overgrowth, harvesting is carried out to avoid such problems and seaweed exploitation has been taken into account only to balance the costs of the harvesting, dumping and destruction of the putrefying, very bad smelling harvested biomass with some economic benefits. Since the end of the 1960s, researchers have been investigating and cultivating the most common phycocolloid-producing species with a view to their possible exploitation, providing useful indications to Italian entrepreneurs. However, the latter have never been interested in cultivating seaweeds for colloid extraction due to the high cost of labour which would have led to a final product not being competitive. Therefore, cultivation has been carried out only on an experimental basis, at most at pilot plant level and, though results have been promising, exploitation on a large scale has never been started.