Underutilised aquaculture products – including lumpfish – and invasive species could be more profitable, according to a team of European scientists.
The BlueCC project aims to extract valuable products, such as collagen and chitin, from novel marine sources. The market for these ingredients is enormous, especially for collagen. The collagen market alone is valued at about $8.6 billion worldwide, according to Forbes.
Nofima leads the BlueCC project, in which a team of scientists extract collagen and chitin – natural biopolymers that are often used in cosmetics and dietary supplements – from invasive species that appear in European waters or end up as by-catch from commercial fishing. They also aim to find a way to exploit lumpfish, which are used as cleanerfish in salmon aquaculture but have to be discarded when the salmon are harvested.
Nofima’s Runar Gjerp Solstad is leading the project and explains that the aim is twofold.
“We have taken a more consumer-driven approach to this research. This means that we are conducting surveys to identify consumer demand and can adjust our research accordingly,” said Solstad in a press relase. “We will then try to extract collagen and chitin from marine by-products using more sustainable methods”.
BlueCC has eight partners from six different countries and has been allocated funding of €2 million from the BlueBio Cofund. Seven academic partners and a Norwegian industrial partner are involved in the project, which runs until the autumn of 2023.
Read more:
https://thefishsite.com/articles/finding-novel-uses-for-undervalued-marine-products