Strategro asking for national seafood byproducts push
USA: Strategro International's founder, Steve Dillingham, provided a startling view of the current US situation regarding utilization of seafood byproducts. His comments were made at the recently held Pacific Rim Summit on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy in Vancouver, British Columbia.
The presentation, titled Development and Commercialization of Value Added Product from Seafood Waste provided several model examples of better seafood utilization from other nations much farther ahead in achieving this goal.
"The U.S. as a whole should be doing a much better collective effort utilizing its seafood byproduct waste to create value-added products," stated Dillingham. "If you look how much focus and research and development activity is taking place within the waste reclamation and biofuels/energy field as a result of the national prioritization and support by DOE funding, you could easily guess how impactful this sort of "put a man on the moon" effort could be if equally applied towards solving the seafood byproduct industry waste problem -- not to mention the ecological and environmental benefits we would gain," continued Dillingham.
The opportunities and benefits to the industry are many fold, according to Dillingham, who showcased to the international biotech audience how value-added marine ingredients are being utilized worldwide across high-value applications such as cosmeceuticals, functional foods and nutraceuticals, and even as biofuel. "These valuable resources are mostly being wasted today -- in a time when the oceans are being overfished because of an increased demand for seafood, and a large portion of the unutilized seafood byproducts are being dumped," Dillingham continued. "We could use a national initiative designed to help solve the logistics, storage and technical challenges, so that these valuable materials could be further processed on a scale where it becomes economically attractive to do so."
The Industrial Biotech Summit, organized by the Biotech Industry Organization (BIO), brings together scientists, government officials, industry executives and investors from North America and throughout the Pacific Rim region to highlight recent advances within the industrial biotech space. Feature presentations include topics on bio-energy, bio-based products, industrial biotechnology, and novel applications of marine biotechnology.
Strategro International is a market entry and business growth firm working with companies and organizations within the functional foods, nutraceuticals, marine biotechnology, and life science sectors.
