Sea Fawn Briganti

GreenWave’s regenerative ocean farming model supports healthy marine ecosystems while growing zero-input, restorative crops for food, fertilizer, feed, and other products. Similarly, companies like New York-based seaweed material technology company LOLIWARE are creating sustainable products that mimic nature’s technology as a scalable solution to negative human impacts on the environment. 

“Single-use plastics are inappropriately designed to last forever,” says LOLIWARE co-founder and CEO Sea Fawn Briganti. Briganti leads an interdisciplinary group of material scientists, food technologists, seaweed biologists, engineers, chemists, industrial designers, and futurologists combining aspects of material science, food technology, and seaweed biology to reimagine traditional single-use plastics. Together, they’ve pioneered a seaweed-based material to create marine-degradable, hyper-compostable straws that look, feel, and act like plastic to curb the global plastics problem. “The Straws are just the beginning,” says Briganti.

When Briganti launched LOLIWARE in 2015, she swiftly narrowed in on seaweed as an ideal renewable resource. One of the fastest-growing plants in the world, kelp offers quick access to a regenerative raw material that provides a wide array of ecosystem services including carbon sequestration. Briganti and her team are dedicated to disrupting the disposable plastics industry with sustainably sourced seaweed-based materials. 

As a fast-growth ocean-tech business, LOLIWARE is hoping to inspire foodservice businesses, corporations, and governments to make the switch to products which support the blue carbon economy – products that Briganti believes are “simply better than anything out there, better for the environment, better for the ocean and better for humans without necessitating changes to existing behavior.”

Briganti is committed to healing the planet by making single-use plastics obsolete and standardizing seaweed-based material technologies. Now that LOLIWARE has launched its line of straws, over the coming years, they’re focused on an array of new and exciting innovations, including new straw, cup, and utensil lines.

Briganti is eager to usher in a new ocean economy alongside organizations like GreenWave and mission-aligned businesses. At GreenWave, we’re excited to see LOLIWARE and other innovative companies think up new ways to use restorative ocean crops and propel the blue-green economy forward.