“Wood pulp has to be bleached as it

“Wood pulp has to be bleached as it contains a lot of coloured compounds. It needs six to seven stages of bleaching. For seaweed pulp, you only need to bleach it twice.”

The project is a joint research between Universiti Malaya, the Fisheries Department and South Korean company Pegasus International Inc that was established in 2004. It all started sometime in the mid-2000s when Pegasus founder You Hack Churl met Phang at a symposium on seaweed and aquaculture. He had been looking for interested parties to jointly realise the pulp-making potential of red algae.