Marine Biorefinery · Advanced biorefinery of fish processing by-products for sustainable production of foods and nutraceuticals

While global fish depletion, environmental pollution, and food security are challenging modern society, over 138 million tons of fish processing by-products (FPBs), including fish processing wastes, by-catches, and marine invasive species, yearly produced in Europe are underutilised with about 55.2 million tons of these are annually landfilled as Category-3 waste. This not only costs 179 per ton for waste treatment and contribute to environmental pollution but also wastes marine bioresources because FPBs are rich resources of proteins, collagen, chitin, lipids, omega-3 fatty acids, calcium, and minerals with commercial applications in foods and nutraceuticals. Efficiently utilising these FPBs for value-added products would not only mitigate the above pressing challenges but also minimise processing costs and produce more food/bioproducts for the increasing population towards sustainable production for a circular blue bioeconomy. However, the conventional recovery of nutrients from FPBs is still challenging due to low extraction efficiency, the complexity of the multi-step process, and high production costs. This project aims to develop an advanced process for multi-product biorefinery of FPBs to efficiently produce nutritional proteins, functional collagen, omega-3-rich oils, and calcium-rich minerals for foods and nutraceuticals by integrating different technologies with synergistic effects. While emerging technologies such as microwave, ultrasound, and supercritical CO2 can physically and biologically intensify the process for enhancing efficiency, shortening processing time, saving energy, and minimising solvents used, the use of a two-phasis system (TPS) composed of switchable hydrophilic/hydrophobic DESs/NADESs enables simplifying the biorefinery process and facilitate separation and product recovery for dramatically saving production costs. Such significant advances combined with optimisation make the proposed process efficient for the biorefinery.