Beyond waste reduction: Creating value from fish processing side-streams
By Patricio Cano Santana – PhD on Bioprocess Engineering, Sustainability Engineer at Blue Synergy.
Today, 29 September, we mark the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, an initiative established by the United Nations to highlight the need to reduce food loss and waste across the entire food system. The focus in 2026 is on the “Transformative Potential of Reducing Food Loss and Waste”, reinforcing an idea that is both simple and important: when food and biological resources are lost or wasted, we also lose part of the water, energy, materials and effort invested in producing them. Reducing these food losses can therefore contribute to food security, lower environmental pressures and a more efficient use of resources.
But reducing waste is only part of the challenge. Some biological side streams are unavoidable, particularly during food processing. In fisheries and aquaculture value chains, for example, processing can generate materials such as heads, bones, skin, viscera and shells. Although these are often considered waste, they may still contain valuable proteins, oils, minerals and other components. The challenge is therefore not only to reduce the amount of waste generated, but also to make better use of the resources that are already available to us. This is where the circular bioeconomy can play an important role, by helping turn unavoidable side streams into new resources and opportunities.
Specifically, this is the challenge being fully addressed by the EU-funded VALORISH project. VALORISH is developing a cascade biorefinery approach to transform fish-processing waste and by-products into valuable bio-based products. Rather than extracting a single component and discarding the remainder, the cascade concept seeks to recover value progressively from different fractions, while identifying further uses for the resulting side streams. In this way, oils, hydrolysates, minerals and high-value compounds such as astaxanthin, vitamin B12 and bacteriocins can be directed towards new applications, while reducing the amount of residual material generated. These technical developments are complemented by sustainability, circularity and regulatory activities, providing a broader assessment of the proposed valorization pathways and supporting their future implementation, uptake and market deployment.
From my perspective, the transformative potential of reducing food loss and waste also depends on how effectively unavoidable side-streams can be preserved and valorised. This means that, for VALORISH, access to fresh fisheries side-streams and rapid processing are therefore essential, while nearby centralized treatment facilities could help bring together material from different local producers, ensuring a more stable supply and reducing storage and transport needs.
**Patricio Cano Santana (PhD on Bioprocess Engineering) is a sustainability engineer at Blue Synergy, where he works on environmental, economic and social sustainability assessment within European research and innovation projects. In VALORISH, his work focuses on assessing the sustainability and feasibility of the proposed fish by-product valorization pathways, helping to complement the project’s technical developments with a broader understanding of their environmental, and socio-economic performance and their potential for future implementation.
