Feed & Additive Magazine Issue 2 March 2021

INTERVIEW FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE March 2021 45 ably, reduce its over-reliance on dwindling marine resources and at the same time reverse the decline in the nutritional value of the fillet, DSM and Evonik established Veramaris®, a joint venture that has devel- oped cutting-edge technology to produce omega-3 EPA and DHA via fermentation of natural marine algae at large scale. Veramaris® will produce 15% of the global salmon industry’s current requirement of EPA and DHA in a waste-free, sustainable process. This innovation will help alleviate pressure on over- fished wild fisheries, enable the salmon industry to become a net producer of fish, help improve marine biodiversity and allow the salmon industry to raise the omega-3 levels in the fillet sustainably. For ex- ample, the amount of EPA and DHA in 1 ton of Ve- ramaris® omega-3 algal oil is equivalent to that in 60 tons of wild catch. Moreover, the Veramaris® factory capacity of omega-3 EPA and DHA is equivalent to 1.2 million tons of wild-caught fish. How can you be so sure that this product is a solution in terms of sustainability? In order to validate the sustainability credentials of this breakthrough technology, Veramaris® worked with leading international research institutions to define new life cycle assessment (LCA) criteria rele- vant to the marine environment. These metrics ex- amine the impact of replacing fish-oil-derived EPA and DHA with that produced by Veramaris® and record the effect of primary production of photo- synthetic carbon (PPR), the sea surface dependency ratio, the pressure of over-fishing, and the forage fish dependency ratio. PPR is a metric reflecting the disturbance of ecosys- tem flows that has been widely used to quantify biotic impacts in seafood LCAs, particularly in aquaculture studies when fish is used as feed in the form of fish meals and oils. It is often used as a metric of marine resource utilization, and the quantifica- tion of PPR is currently the most widely adopted metric to assess ecosystem impacts of farmed fish. Global fishery catches have been identified as constrained by the available primary production and may at present be at unsustainable levels in terms of utilization of ecosystem primary production. Could we expand this issue a little more? Can you illustrate the results of your research and trial studies? The LCA studies indicate that 59 tons of carbon need to be converted by photosynthesis and fed into the food web to produce 1 ton of salmon based on a typical, current commercial salmon diet. How- ever, when replacing the fish oil in the salmon diet with Veramaris® algal oil (without reducing the fish meal component of the diet) the photosynthetic car- bon requirement is reduced by 45%. Likewise, the sea surface area required for the production of the photosynthetic carbon is reduced by 44%. And the amount of forage fish (e.g. anchovies, sprat and cap- elin) caught at unsustainable levels to produce 1 ton of salmon is, in this example, reduced by 52%. This is very positive, since catches from wild-capture fish- eries have actually been declining since peak global catches in the mid-1990s and the status of fishery stocks analyzed by FAO continue to show a detri- mental trend — one of declining status across the board. The last metric — forage fish dependency ratio (FFDR) — is a metric for describing the quantity of wild fish used in feeds in relation to the quanti- ty of farmed fish produced. The salmon industry has a strong sustainability ambition to become a net producer of fish, which means using less than 1 ton of marine resources to produce 1 ton of salmon.