Making the most of the catch — including the head and guts

Nordic Wildfish, located on the island of Valderøya, west of Ålesund, Norway, has been working with the research company SINTEF to find ways to utilise the entire fish in its hauls of cod, pollock and haddock. Currently around 92% of marine whitefish by-product is discarded as waste, with only the fillets processed to become food.

In 2014, SINTEF reported that 340,000 tonnes of whitefish by-product are discarded into the sea annually. The research organisation believes that this by-product has major commercial potential if it can be processed to produce high-quality end products such as ingredients in animal feed and food for human consumption.

Instead of discarding the head, the guts and the rest of the fish, Nordic Wildfish is trialling an hydrolysis process that separates the bones, leaving a kind of ‘soup’ to which enzymes can be added and valuable oils and proteins extracted. The entire process takes place onboard the trawler, with many technologies having been developed and adapted for installation onboard the refurbished trawler.

The company has been nominated for the 2016 Innovation Prize awarded by the technical journal Teknisk ukeblad for this project.