The U.S. seafood industry should make better use of seafood byproducts for economic and environmental benefits, said a market consultant at last month's Pacific Rim Summit on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy in Vancouver, British Columbia.
"The United States as a whole should be doing a much better collective effort utilizing its seafood byproduct waste to create value-added products," says Steve Dillingham, founder and principal of Strategro, a market entry and business growth firm in West Orange, N.J.
"If you look how much focus and research and development activity is taking place within the waste reclamation and biofuels/energy field as a result of the national prioritization and support by [Department of Energy] funding, you could easily guess how impactful this sort of 'put a man on the moon' effort could be if equally applied towards solving the seafood byproduct industry waste problem - not to mention the ecological and environmental benefits we would gain."
Dillingham's presentation, titled Development and Commercialization of Value Added Product from Seafood Waste, provided several examples of better seafood utilization around the world. Dillingham says value-added marine ingredients are being utilized across high-value applications such as cosmetics, functional foods, nutraceuticals and biofuels.
"These valuable resources are mostly being wasted today - in a time when the oceans are being overfished because of an increased demand for seafood, and a large portion of the unutilized seafood byproducts are being dumped," Dillingham says. "We could use a national initiative designed to help solve the logistics, storage and technical challenges, so that these valuable materials could be further processed on a scale where it becomes economically attractive to do so."
