The UK government has awarded nearly £1.3 million in funding to help improve the sustainability and resilience of the fishing, aquaculture and seafood sectors.
The grants, awarded by the UK Seafood Innovation Fund (SIF) in its latest funding round, are split across 28 feasibility studies with each being given between £13,600 and £50,000.
SIF has already supported a total of 94 projects since its inception in 2019. “SIF has enabled all sorts of innovations from right across Great Britain, looking to boost the UK’s blue foods, from prawns to trout, seaweed to salmon,” said SIF steering group member Heather Jones.
“The fund supports sustainable food production, with projects ranging from proving novel feed ingredients for farmed fish, to repurposing waste from shellfish production, to using renewable energy to run fish farms.”
The projects address diverse issues across the UK industry, with five focusing on sustainability, eight on aquaculture, and seven on seafood processing and the supply chain. The remaining projects are exploring innovative approaches to topics such as humane slaughter, the underdeveloped seaweed market and improvements in vessel stability.
One project, Recycling Ocean Resources, aims to use chitin - a substance extracted from the shells of certain shellfish - to create carbon for battery storage technology. Another, The Cornish Seaweed Company, is developing a land-based cultivation system which could help expand the sustainable seaweed market, while a project led by Mimica Lab is adapting technology used to reduce waste in the meat industry for the seafood sector.
