‘This project is commercially viable’
Provincial fund pumps $2.4 million to help Verschuren Centre commercialize fisheries waste-to-product initiative
A provincial funding agency is investing $2.4 million to help a Cape Breton research centre commercialize the process of turning marine waste into sellable products for a variety of markets.
The money is from Invest Nova Scotia, an independent fund set up by the province for the purpose of granting economic incentives designed to spark measurable and sustainable innovation in Nova Scotia.
The recipient is Cape Breton University’s Verschuren Centre for Sustainability in Energy and the Environment, an institution that has developed cutting-edge technology that turns unused marine biomass into commercial products for the feed, plant and food industries.
“This funding will help bring sustainability and competitive advantage to the marine and agriculture sectors,” said centre CEO and lead researcher Dr. Beth Mason.
“We are excited to begin the commercialization and product development process, expanding our engagement with industry.”
But what is marine waste? And what can the centre’s new technology do to turn it into
commercial products.
According to Mason, the process, which is the first of its kind in North America, can effectively take leftovers from the fishing industry and transforms that biomass
into low-grade (livestock food ingredients), mid-grade (anti-oxidant and other additives) and high-grade products (human food).
“The project we have can take things like fisheries waste, things like off-cuts, that’s head, guts and tails, lobster shells, really anything that’s off-cut from processing — we tend to call them byproducts rather than waste because they are the beginning of our value piece,” she said, adding that some of the technology is patented.
“It started a while ago when we got pilot-scale equipment through ACOA (Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency) and this additional funding over the next three years will commercialize what we got by getting those products to end market, so we can develop the whole commercial venture.”
On Thursday, Mason was joined by CBU chancellor Annette Verschuren and university president David Dingwall in accepting the funding from Invest Nova Scotia chair Ken Deveau and board member Adrian White. According to Deveau, the Verschuren Centre project is a perfect fit for the criteria in receiving funding from the provincial agency.
“This is the type of project that will make the Cape Breton and Nova Scotia economies grow,” said Deveau.
“Now that their process has been developed and tested and equipment designed, the fund will be used to help them go commercial — this project is commercially viable, and it solves a real-world problem in that it helps the fisheries industry to divert its waste in a clean and efficient manner.”
The Invest Nova Scotia fund was established in 2014.