Recovery and valorisation of unsorted fish processing side-streams: the first 36 months of the H2020 “EcoeFISHent” project

Due to the higher fish consumption, the consequent generation of side-streams by the fish supply chain (i.e., 'unwanted catches' and/or bones, fins, skin, viscera..) is increasing, significantly contributing to global food waste [1]. EcoeFISHent (“Demonstrable and replicable cluster implementing systemic solutions through multilevel circular value chains for eco-efficient valorization of fishing and fish industries side-streams”) is a project of the Horizon 2020 Program - Green Deal dedicated to the circular economy in the fishing sector, designed to reconcile industrial development, socio-economic growth, and protection of the marine environment [2]. Answering to many of the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda, EcoeFISHent moved from the design and development of an innovative dehydration pre-treatment of these highly perishable biomasses coupled with innovative extraction technologies allowing a sustainable and efficient use of these side-streams in different fields including food, cosmetic and biomaterials. The Food Chemistry research group of the Department of Pharmacy of the University of Genoa (Italy) deals with the recovery and valorisation of unsorted non separated fishery side-streams, thus avoiding the onerous sorting step of fish leftovers, and their transformation into high value bioactive compounds, such as peptides (gelatine, hydrolyzed collagen peptides, non-collagenous proteins), fatty acids (omega-3) and other bioactive metabolites. Innovative scalable extraction processes exploiting environmentally friendly techniques such as enzymatic-assisted extraction and ultrasounds have been proposed to manage biomasses coming from aquaculture (i.e., sea bream and sea bass samples) and from the industrial canned yellowfin tuna processing, aiming to potentially recover also the intermediate co-products.