Fish processors can make a buck by making use of fish parts they normally throw away, says Kelly Hawboldt, a Memorial University of Newfoundland professor specializing in process engineering.

She and her team at the Ocean Frontier Institute are looking at turning waste from all kinds of fish — finfish and shellfish, both farmed and wild — into valuable products such as fuel, road salt and even nail polish.

\"There\'s a whole bunch of value-added products in there,\" said Hawboldt. \"It\'s just a matter of figuring out the ways to sustainably and economically extract it.\"

Hawboldt and her team can extract high-quality oil from finfish guts for nutraceutical use and then use the waste from that process — a high-protein fish pulp — as fish meal or animal feed.

They\'re also developing a way for processors to quickly and sustainably remove the nub of meat left on mussel shells because the shells can be extremely valuable.

Hawboldt said they can be ground up to be used as absorbents or road salts. One member of her team, chemistry student Jennifer Murphy, even made a nail polish from the shells.

Source: CBC News // Original Article