Surprise ingredient
into laundry rooms everywhere
A few decades ago, most people considered seaweed something to avoid during walks on the beach, but the slippery marine plant has come a long way. As an ingredient, it’s attained superfood status, popping up in smoothies, salads, and nutritional supplements. As a crop, it’s become a secondary revenue source for fishermen and attracted attention for its ability to combat the effects of climate change. And for Alexa McGovern ’16, it was the inspiration for a whole new career.
At 31, McGovern is the owner of , located in Portland, Maine, just a short drive from where she grew up, and while her business revolves around kelp, growing and harvesting it is not her primary goal. Instead, McGovern and her team use the algae to create a truly biodegradable alternative to plastic, one of the most ubiquitous and harmful materials on the planet. Specifically, they’re working to replace the type of thin, single-use plastic found in products like laundry and dishwasher pods, which researchers have labeled as a major source of microplastic waste.
“Pods are marketed as an environmentally friendly alternative—you’re not shipping plastic bottles around the country filled with 70 percent water,” said McGovern, “but the plastic film is only biodegradable in certain environments, and our wastewater treatment plants aren’t one of them.”
Microplastics (tiny plastic particles under 5 millimeters in size) come from just about everywhere—synthetic textiles, vehicle tires, road markings, and body wash are some of the top offenders—and end up polluting our waterways and our bodies. Although their impact on human health is still undetermined, many plastics contain toxic chemicals known to cause cancer and other serious health issues.
The Dirigo team: Dash Masland, Alexa McGovern, Deane Falcone, and Joan Lawton. (Photo: Jill Hoyle)
Scientist Joan Lawton M.S. '85, with McGovern at the Dirigo lab. (Photo: Jill Hoyle)
McGovern first began digging into the implications of microplastics after receiving a breast cancer diagnosis at the age of 29. She had given birth to her daughter eight months prior, and was working in product development at a tech startup in Boston. The idea of her family being exposed to toxins simply by wearing certain clothing or running a load of laundry struck her as a problem she would like to help solve.
“It just snapped into perspective what I wanted to spend my time doing,” she recalled.
McGovern had read about kelp farming in a magazine and watched with interest as her home state became the nation’s largest producer of kelp in 2020 (last year, Maine’s harvest topped one million pounds). Putting the two ideas together led to her aha moment, and in 2024, Dirigo Sea Farm was born, named after Maine’s state motto, which translates to “I lead.”
A thin sheet of bioplastic derived from kelp. (Photo: Jill Hoyle)
As a first-time business owner, McGovern knew she lacked the hard science skills necessary to make her vision a reality, so she set about surrounding herself with people who did. The five-person team initially operated out of McGovern’s home, creating their first prototype at her kitchen counter. Now, manufacturing takes place in a small lab in Portland, where Dirigo scientists mix up buckets of “magic goo” (a greenish brown slurry made of compounds extracted from kelp) and cast it onto sheets to create durable but dissolvable bioplastic. The company buys most of its kelp from a Maine-based distributor, but maintains a small sea farm off the coast of Kittery to conduct research on new growth techniques.
McGovern was a communication major at Boston College but she’s never launched a formal advertising campaign for Dirigo. Still, public support for her young company’s mission has been strong from the outset: a signup form on the farm’s website received close to 200 submissions from people interested in learning more about future products, and nearly 10 companies have expressed interest in collaborating. Right now, Dirigo is working with a brand manufacturer to provide bioplastic material for a line of laundry pods, which should be available to consumers later this year.
“They’ll be a taupe-y beige color instead of clear, but that’s really the biggest change,” said McGovern of the pods. “Ours dissolve a little faster than what’s on the market today but that’s actually a positive.”
Coming up on the one-year anniversary of Dirigo, McGovern is already wondering if other compounds contained within the humble kelp plant could help our planet kick its plastic addiction. Her team is currently exploring whether a fibrous byproduct of the bioplastic manufacturing process could be used to create a cardboard alternative, potentially utilizing infrastructure left behind in abandoned Maine paper mills. Who knows what else they might discover if they look hard enough.
“There’s this innate curiosity that I was really lucky to be constantly surrounded by at BC, and I think that’s what led me to put a lot of building blocks together,” said McGovern. “I really love getting to understand what I don’t know."