Protix has been producing insect ingredients at its fully ramped-up industrial scale plant in the Netherlands since 2019 © Protix
A recent peer review published in ScienceDirect confirms Protix’s Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) data, demonstrating that Protix’s insect ingredients have a remarkably low environmental footprint in land and water use, as well as emissions. The German Institute of Food Technologies and the Institute of Food Quality and Food Safety scientists' results are based on primary data collated directly from Protix’s commercial operation, which operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week at full capacity.
Protix produces insect ingredients for pet food, animal feed and plant care worldwide. The company is passionate about driving down the environmental impact across the feed and food system.
“We welcome these peer-reviewed results as independent confirmation of the capacity of our insect ingredients to significantly reduce the environmental impact. There is still a lot of potential to lower the footprint of the black soldier fly ever further, for example with government approval for the use of lower grade feedstock. This is something we continue to work tirelessly on,” said Piotr Postepski, chief commercial officer of Protix, in a press release.
Key environmental benefits
The peer review data for Protix’s products compared against incumbent ingredients yield the following:
- ProteinX insect meal is confirmed to reduce CO2 emissions by 78 percent compared with the poultry meal often used in pet food and livestock feed. Compared to soy protein concentrate, an ingredient often used in aquaculture, ProteinX lowers CO2 emissions by as much as 89 percent.
- For LipidX, Protix’s insect fat, the land use figure was already close to zero. The peer review shows it has improved even further, now approaching near-zero levels.
- PureeX, Protix’s unique fresh insect meat, uses a staggering 99.8 percent less water than the poultry meat commonly used in pet food as a high moisture protein source.
These figures either remained the same or showed even greater environmental benefits against earlier comparisons published by Protix. Back in 2024, Protix already published LCA results based on data collected from the Bergen op Zoom plant in 2023. The improvements between the peer-reviewed numbers and the numbers published in 2024 are mainly due to the fact that some external databases that the scientists used for feedstock data and energy mix data had undergone some changes.
