Student’s business aims to convert crab to chitosan
Chitosan is a white powder that has a wide range of uses, from water treatment and food stabilization to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals
As Dante Enewold travelled around Newfoundland and Labrador to visit various fish processing plants as a procurement officer, he couldn’t help but wonder if something could be done with the wasted byproduct he regularly saw.
“What I came to realize is there’s just a ton of waste in the fisheries,” he said. “Each crab, you lose nearly 50 per cent of it. It’s the same with lobster and shrimp.
“There are these massive piles of waste coming up everywhere and that just gets dumped right now.”
After looking into the possibilities further, the British Columbia native, who came to St. John’s to study at Memorial University seven years ago, saw that crab shells could be processed into a material called chitosan.
The fine white powder that can be rendered has many uses, depending on how refined it is.
ATLANTIC BIOCORP
Finding a way to make chitosan from discarded shellfish remnants led to Enewold creating a company he called Atlantic Biocorp.
In just under a year, Atlantic Biocorp completed its first fundraising round, secured a supplier and engaged with a potential customer in British Columbia.
The business idea was recently named the top winner at the Mel Woodward Cup, a startup pitch competition for Memorial University students.
The prize for winning the Woodward Cup is $25,000, which Enewold — a business and philosophy student — can now invest in the company.
BUILDING A REFINERY
“It felt pretty surreal to win,” he said.
“There were some great other competitors. I was surprised to win, but grateful that I got it.”
He plans to use the money to build a refinery to convert crab waste to chitosan.
“We’ve got all the science down pat and have done preliminary testing,” explained Enewold. “Now it’s, 'Let's go to the big leagues and actually go build.'”
SHIPPING CONTAINER FACILITY
While a refinery may conjure up a significantly complex facility such as the Come By Chance oil refinery, the kind of refinery Enewold needs is far simpler.
His vision is to build a modular facility using five shipping containers, one for each step of the process involved in making chitosan from raw shells.
“This makes health approval and regulatory (approval) so much simpler because they’re already hermetic chambers,” explained Enewold.
The process involves a series of steps using chemicals such as hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide to remove any protein from the shell and to demineralize the product.
Eventually, the process creates what is known as chitin, which has value as a food additive.
'WIDE VARIETY OF APPLICATIONS'
Chitosan, explained Enewold is chitin that has been refined even further. In its basic form, it can be used to treat wastewater, which Enewold sees as being useful for the brewery and mining industries.
When it's further refined again, chitosan can be used as a food stabilizer in milk and cheese production or as an anti-microbial for produce, said Enewold.
Taking the refining yet another step further, the product could be used in cosmetics.
The highest quality chitosan, noted Enewold, has uses in the pharmaceutical realm.
“That’s the most exciting part; it has such a wide variety of applications,” he said.
THE MARKET
According to Enewold, demand currently outstrips the supply of chitosan, and the market for it is ready to explode.
“The market right now is valued at around $12 million,” he said.
“But it’s supposed to grow by 2030 to about $80 billion. There is a massive demand and right now it’s not being satisfied.”
The biggest challenge, he said, is getting his hands on enough raw material to make the refinery feasible.
He said he has been in talks with some fish plants about taking their waste crab and hopes to leverage the $25,000 from his Woodward Cup win to get more funding from other sources to build the refinery.
He’s thinking of building the refinery in the vicinity of Old Perlican, where there would be a few fish plants close by.
‘THE SWEET SPOT’
While chitosan could be produced using lobster and shrimp shells as well, it’s crab — one of the province’s biggest fisheries — that’s likely to be the most abundant and more lucrative species to use.
Harvested lobsters are more often sold live, so accessing those shells can be more difficult. Lobster shells are also harder and require more effort to break down.
Shrimp, meanwhile, would not yield as much chitosan as crab shells would.
“So, crab is sort of the sweet spot for us,” he said. “Once we run out of that supply, we could hit lobster and shrimp, so there are lots of opportunities to grow once we max out the crab market.”
ABOUT THE WOODWARD CUP
• The Mel Woodward Cup was created through a donation to the Faculty of Business Administration at Memorial University in 2017 from the family of the late Dr. Mel Woodward, founder of the Woodward Group of Companies.
• The $15,000 runner-up at the Woodward Cup was Invertable, founded by Jessika Lamarre, a PH.D. student in cognitive and behaviour ecology in the Faculty of Science. Invertable is developing a land-based fish feed made of insects as an alternative to using wild stocks to feed farmed fish. Lamarre will be seeking approval from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and filing a patent with the goal of fully launching her product in the spring of 2025.
• Two other awards were handed out, courtesy of the Fry Family Foundation. Lamarre won the award for women or non-binary leadership. Tuckamore Technologies, founded by engineering students Tyler Yard and Ben Thomas, as well as Carl Thibault, who is not a Memorial student, won for the most promising earlystage idea.