Sustainable aquaculture firm BioMar Group celebrated ten years of implementing and refining its BioSustain concept during an event held at its new offices in Norway on 14 August.
With the establishment of BioSustain back in 2007 – which officially launched during Seafood Expo Global in Brussels, Belgium that year – BioMar was able to firmly establish itself “as the forerunner in driving sustainable innovation through collaborative partnerships in the aquaculture industry,” according to the company.
“Over a decade ago we recognized the need to find sustainable solutions to fishmeal and fish oil and believed that ‘profit through sustainability’ was possible,” explained Carlos Diaz, CEO BioMar Group.
BioSustain is a concept that converges all three dimensions of sustainability: economy, environment and society. The platform is inherently adaptable, allowing BioMar to adjust its functions to best serve the ever-evolving aquaculture industry, said the company. Developed in collaboration with BASF and in parallel with DNV’s ProSustain program, the BioSustain concept was ultimately “born out of the need to reduce the dependence on marine-based fishmeal and fish oil, and the original concept focused on fish feed solutions for salmon.”
“It has long since been possible to replace fishmeal with other protein sources, but we didn’t stop there -We continue to push the innovation frontier and today we can produce fish feeds with zero inclusion of marine ingredients where the fish oil is replaced with microalgae, omega-3 in their native form,” said Carlos Diaz.
The next steps for the BioSustain project include the creation of a fully integrated tool for tracking and measuring sustainability at the sourcing side of the value chain, said BioMar.
“We are currently working on Triple S (Sustainable Solution Steering), which will fundamentally change the way we source raw materials and give us full transparency so that we can measure sustainability at the origin of the value chain,” noted Vidar Gundersen, Global Sustainability Director for BioMar Group.
The company has had a long history with sustainability, expanding out beyond its strides over the past decade with BioSustain and the upcoming Triple S, said Diaz. Back in the 1960s, the company introduced extruded fish feed into the market, significantly reducing negative impacts on local water environments. BioMar also created ECOLINE, which is considered to be the first declared environmentally friendly fish feed in the world; the feed went on to win the Danish Environmental Award in 1988.
