Aquaculture and the Environment. Life Cycle Assessment on Icelandic Arctic char fed with three different feed types

• Main Author: Birgir Örn Smárason 1984-
• Other Authors: Háskóli Íslands
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: Umhverfis- og auðlindafræði; Fiskeldi; Dýrafóður; Umhverfisáhrif; Bleikja; Vistfræði; Arctic
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1946/15119

With ever growing consumption the world tries to supply food for a population exceeding 7 billion. Aquaculture has been heralded for its potential to meet this huge increase in food demand and is therefore a large contributor to feed the world. It continues to be the fastest growing animal food production sector, accounting for 45.6% of the world‘s fish consumption in 2011. However, according to WWF one-third of global wild-caught fish is processed into fishmeal and fish oil used in large quantities for fish feed. This puts the sustainability of wild fisheries under threat while the environmental impacts of aquaculture are increasingly criticized and analyzed. This study utilized Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to quantify the environmental impacts of 1 kg of live-weight Arctic char, cultivated in an Icelandic land-based aquaculture farm. The functional unit included assessments of three different feed types; Conventional feed, ECO feed and the Black soldier fly feed. Results of the study indicate that the feed production causes the greatest environmental impacts from all feed types considered. The Black soldier fly feed demonstrated the best environmental performance of the three feed types. Furthermore, it can be concluded that by increasing agriculture based ingredients at the cost of marine based ingredients, a better environmental performance can be reached. This study also confirmed that the transportation of materials needed for the aquaculture process, including the feed materials, has very low environmental impacts. Transporting by air causes immense environmental impacts compared to sea transport. This study demonstrated the importance of feed production for aquaculture in terms of environmental impacts and showed that by decreasing the amount of feed consumed, reducing the amount of fishmeal and fish oil and even creating new types of feed from other forms of biotic ingredients can greatly reduce the overall impacts of aquaculture. Með vaxandi neyslu reynir heimurinn að sjá fyrir 7 milljörðum jarðabúa. ...