ARTICLE Alternative Proteins Magazine April 2024 47 industrial and agricultural production systems, reducing the energy input requirement, thus reducing the use of grid energy. This is particularly significant in parts of the world where little of the energy mix is renewable, and so can make an outsized difference by replacing grid with solar. The other major opportunity is to use feeds with low-impact protein ingredients, such as insect meal. Insect meal, and particularly BSF meal, has been identified as a high potential replacement for fishmeal to reduce ocean impacts, and soybean meal to reduce deforestation and biodiversity loss, but little has been discussed around the GHG-reduction opportunity presented by insect meal (and oil). In 2023 Nutrition Technologies conducted a LifeCycle Assessment (LCA) following the European Commission’s cradle-to-gate Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology, to identify the various impacts that result from farming BSF for animal feed in Malaysia. Similar to livestock production, the top two impact hotspots in BSF production are energy and feed, indicating that using a clean energy mix, and making efficiencies and optimising feed formulae for the BSF will make the biggest saving in emissions, which can then be passed on to feed manufacturers and animal producers. Looking more closely at our own production hotspots and comparing them to publicly available information from other BSF producers around the world, we can see that the lower environmental impact of our BSF meal is possible for three major reasons; the use of a low-energy tropical production system, the use of low-grade raw materials used to feed the BSF larvae, and implementing a fermentation step to release more nutrition from the raw materials. One of the major implications of comparing LCAs from different producers, is to understand
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