No guts left behind: Icelands quest to repurpose fish waste

Date:
Thu, 20 Jul 2023 01:00:00 +0000

Description:
Cod makes for good eating. But with a bit of creativity, researchers have discovered that the rest of the animalonce discarded as scrapscan do so much more. Deposit Photos Cod heads, skin, blood. You name it, theres an
initiative to turn it into a high-value product and divert it from the trash. The post No guts left behind: Icelands quest to repurpose fish waste appeared first on Popular Science .

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Cod makes for good eating. But with a bit of creativity, researchers have discovered that the rest of the animalonce discarded as scrapscan do so much more. Deposit Photos

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine , an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more
stories like this at hakaimagazine.com .

A bleary-eyed predawn traveler walking through the arrivals hall of Icelands Keflavik Airport blinks at a sight thats hard at first to register: an enormous advertisement showing a shirtless man holding an infant. The mans torso and visible arm show a swath of pucker-patterned skin. He looks half-aquatic, like a member of some superhero universe.

As it happens, this sleep-deprived analysis isnt far off. The baby-holding man, Ptur Oddsson, is a power station worker. In 2020, he endured a 60,000-volt electrical shock; it left almost half his body covered in deep thermal burns that charred layers of his skin off. Such deep and extensive burns can be fatalskin damaged in this way cant make new cells to regenerate, and infections can easily set in . But Oddssons life was spared by an ingenious invention: grafted cod skin7,000 square centimeters of it. The procedure adorned Oddssons upper body with the permanent, distinct imprint of scales.

Oddssons cod skin grafts are a marvel of medical technology. But they also represent something else: the manifestation of an unusual and ambitious experiment in environmental efficiency. The skin grafts are just one of a
slew of productsincludingOmega-3 capsules, cold virus pretreatment sprays,
and dog snacksmade from what was once Icelands cod catch detritus. They come largely from the efforts of 100% Fisha project spurred by the incubator Iceland Ocean Cluster in collaboration with research institutes and private companies to determine how to repurpose byproducts from the countrys US $2-billion seafood sector.

So far, enterprising Icelanders have unlocked uses for almost 95 percent of a coda pretty recent jump forward. In 2003, people only knew what to do with about 40 percent of the fish.

rni Mathiesen, the clusters senior adviser and the countrys former fisheries minister, says the 100% Fish Project has created jobs and manifested once-scarce domestically produced goods. It has also, adds Alexandra Leeper, the clusters head of research and innovation, provided lower-impact fish meal for a burgeoning aquaculture industry. Relatedly, 100% Fish is looking beyond cod, too. A company called Nordic Fish Leather is upcycling farmed salmon
skin into leather for accessories and another, Primex, is extracting chitosan from the shells of wild-caught Atlantic northern shrimp, which can be used as a blood-clotting agent.

The cod skin grafts are the brainchild of Fertram Sigurjonsson, a chemist and the founder of biotech company Kerecis, which is part of the 100% Fish Project. The grafts come in several sizeswide strips, for large wounds; glove shapes, for hands; and granules, which act like putty in smaller woundsand have been used to treat thousands of burn victims, diabetes patients with
open wounds, and women with infected C-sections. Doctors can perform some of these procedures with pigskin grafts, but those are harvested from animals engineered for the purpose. The fish skin, conversely, comes from cod caught for human consumption by fishermen in Sigurjonssons northwestern hometown of Isafjordur. (Fishermen who also own valuable shares in his company.)

Sigurjonsson says Kerecis currently transforms a mere 0.01 percent of Icelandic cod skins into grafts. But as demand grows, and as Kerecis research and development department determines more usestheyre investigating breast reconstructionhes looking to expand.

By weight, a cod is about eight percent skin. Beyond making for good grafting material, cod skin is rich in collagen, a supplement for human skin,
ligament, and bone health. Cod skin easily sheds this protein when its boiled in water with enzymes, says Hrnn Margrt Magnsdttir. Shes the founder of a collagen supplement and energy drink company called Feel Iceland, which uses collagen derived from 700 tonnes of fish skin per year.

Bones account for at least 35 percent of acods weight. Icelandic companies have long dried fish heads and spines with the countrys abundant geothermal energy and exported them to Nigeria, where theyre the base of a protein-rich soup. But Margrt Geirsdttir, a project manager at Mats, a food and biotechnology research institute that partners with the Iceland Ocean
Cluster, says the unpredictability of that market has sent researchers
looking for new applicationssuch as extracting calcium for supplements.

By far the most challenging holdouts to whole-fish use are the blood and eyeballs, says Geirsdttir.

According to Icelandic lore, squeezing the liquid from a redfish eyeball onto a wound prevents infection. Mats scientists followed this up, studying
whether cod eyeballs might have antiseptic properties. No such luck. They
also had a project, says Geirsdttir, to see whether the eyes contained valuable fats. They do, she says, but its such a low amount and you would
need to [extract] it by hand, so its not paying off.

Fish blood,accounting for 10 percent of a fishs weight, might be used to make products like those made from the blood of land animals, such as sausage filler, fish feed, or fertilizer. Yet Geirsdttir says the hardest part about working with fish blood is collecting it. On a commercial fishing boat, cod are quickly bled to maintain their freshness. Convincing skeptical fishermen to invest in storing the fish intact means proving the endeavor is
worthwhile.

There is an optimistic precedent, however. Fishermen once tossed cod livers overboard; now theyre an expensive delicacy that fishermen are happy to preserve. What changed? Several years back, Geirsdttir says, fishermen began to see high profits from the sale of cod liver. Then they started to see the value in it, she says.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

The post No guts left behind: Icelands quest to repurpose fish waste appeared first on Popular Science . Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.



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Link to news story:
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