“I always wanted to come back to Mexico and live my Mexican dream,” says Omar de Jesús Vazquez Sánchez, who is sometimes nicknamed Señor Sargazo or Mr. Sargassum. “Not the American dream … I wanted to come back and do something for my country.”

Omar is an innovator who saw potential in what others thought was an unsolvable problem – the noxious brown sargassum seaweed that plagues beaches in Mexico and increasingly, North America and the Caribbean. Since 2015, his business, Blue Green, has been turning the seaweed into bricks to build basic but sturdy homes for low income families, even as his business helps support tourism by cleaning the beaches.