Current status and future horizons in sustainable aquafeed certification and circular production practices

Progress in the certification sector has not kept pace with the speed of innovation in alternative aquafeed components, particularly when incorporating the impact of including agricultural waste streams. Assessing the sustainability of the diverse range of agricultural waste into aquafeed ingredients has necessitated a review of assessment matrices to adequately capture the impact of aquafeeds across a large range of supply chains. Moving away from relatively simplified matrices relating to fish meal usage, current assessments in sustainable practices are moving towards Life Cycle Analysis. Life Cycle Analysis captures the transfer of nutrients and energy within a system to assess the long-term sustainability of the process. The application of the LCA tool however risks overestimating the impact of aquafeed ingredients by attributing the impact of the entire production line of agricultural products into life cycle footprint of aquafeed production. Ironically, the process of LCA inadvertently leads to poor assessment outcomes that contradict the benefits of circularity in efficiently reducing and utilising waste streams to productive food outputs or improved ecological performance. Consequently, the traditional LCA tool is not ideal, and further developments such as current efforts towards economic allocation of environmental burden of co-products show promise. Although aquaculture has turned to LCA as a measuring tool, the potential to utilise the tool to develop rather than measure more sustainable practices has rarely been recognised. Developing circularity and integrated processes like IMTA present opportunities to utilise nutrient cycling to substantially improve production both through contributions in feed and waste usage as well energy retention. However, IMTA is a complex system, with a large technical barrier to entry and success. To date there has been little government support to motivate businesses to integrate their production systems. Certification could become the driver in the next evolutionary step towards sustainable practice in aquaculture. This chapter outlines the contribution and evolution of certification programs to drive aquafeed innovation and presents the prospect that a similar drive in innovation could be achieved with certification programs that recognise the sustainability in harnessing nutrient cycling via circularity in aquaculture.

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Novel protein and lipid sources in animal nutrition

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