Each year we celebrate Earth Day in gratitude for all the magnificence this beautiful planet provides us, from the food that we eat to the natural resources that we use to clothe and house ourselves. Alongside these practical offerings, Earth is covered with spectacular landscapes and wonderous creatures, so wide ranging one human could never hope to see them all. Not event if you are David Attenborough!

Despite the Earth’s beauty and ability to provide for us, we need a special day to be reminded that this dear Planet is suffering at the hands of human actions, resulting in climate change, biodiversity loss, erosion, pollution and natural resource depletion just to name a few. It is important that positive action is taken, this includes ensuring that ideas developed by scientists in labs find a way to the market.

In AQUABIOPRO-FIT, consortium partners are taking positive steps to ensure raw materials from the fisheries and aquaculture are used efficiently. Currently only 50% of the fish biomass caught or farmed in Europe ends up on your dinner plate. Fish heads, skin, and bones are considered non-edible side streams and are often discarded, even though they are rich in protein, omega-3s, minerals and other valuable nutrients. Our mission is to develop innovative and non-conventional processing technologies to recover valuable ingredients with high bioactivity from fish side streams in a sustainable way. These ingredients will be used to create natural products with high nutritional value, like nutritional supplements.

AQUABIOPRO-FIT is also optimising farming and processing of tunicates. These sea squirts have an amazing ability to act as a biofilter that reduce eutrophication in the sea and improve water quality. After harvesting, tunicates can then be used as a novel source of fibre and proteins in animal feed.

By using circular economy principles, this project that is funded by the Bio-Based Industries Joint undertaking will contribute to reducing the pressures on Earth.

Happy Earth day! Let’s all do what we can to protect this Planet!