At a prize ceremony in Brussels, 15 October, representatives for SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden and its subsidiary SP Processum were awarded as runner-up of the EARTO Innovation Prize 2014 for the project GreenFeed, in which a method to produce Single cell protein from a residual stream from the forest industry has been developed for use in fish feed.
The Innovation Prize was presented by Joaquín Almunia, European Commissioner for Competition.
EARTO, European Association of Research and Technology Organisations, is the cooperation organisation for European research institutes. Each year three innovation projects with a great potential are awarded the Innovation Prize. And now for the first time a Swedish project has been awarded this high status price.
”It is amazing that GreenFeed, our project for production of Single cell protein from industrial residual streams for use in fish feed, has been awarded with this great price,” said Björn Alriksson, project leader at SP Processum.
”We started this work a few years ago and used a residual stream from the Domsjö mill for production of Single cell protein on laboratory scale. Since then we have refined the technology on pilot scale and we have also verified the process on a large scale in the SP Biorefinery Demo Plant in Örnsköldsvik - and it proved to work very well.”
”Our partners from Iceland, Matis and Saebyli, have produced fish feed containing our Single cell protein and have carried out successful feeding trials on the fish species Tilapia. The results showed an equal or even better growth of the fish when compared to a fishmeal-based control feed. The next step is to proceed with large scale tests as well as development of a business concept for this new product.”
”Fish farming is getting increasingly important in order to feed the growing population of the world, but fish feed is today produced from wild fish,” said Maria Khorsand, CEO, SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden.
”If we do not do anything to solve this, the consequence will be an ever increasing depletion of fish. The concept developed within the GreenFeed project is thus very interesting as it addresses the current overfishing of forage fish.”
”We have built a very good infrastructure here in Örnsköldsvik with different pilot equipment for development projects like this one,” said Clas Engström, CEO at SP Processum.
”We have been able to run efficient pilot and demo scale trials together with relevant industrial partners along the whole value chain. As SP also has a demonstration plant for upscaling of industrial biotechnology processes we have been able to verify the process almost on an industrial scale. I really look forward to eventually eating fish fed with fish feed based on our technology.”
