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A Life Cycle Assessment of Gilt-head Seabream (Sparus aurata L.) aquaculture using different fish feeds

Calle Lobo, Sergio (2016) BIOP01 20161
Degree Projects in Biology
Popular Abstract
Aquaculture is the culture of plants, algae or animals that live in aquatic systems. It started being developed in the 50s and it has increased enormously since then. Aquaculture has the potential of mitigating some worldwide problems such as the global hunger and the fishing pressure. However, aquaculture is not perfect and it has several impacts over the environment. In order to assess all of that impacts, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method has been prove to be a good tool in several studies. Some LCAs performed over aquaculture in different fish species have determined that the most important impact contributor is the aquafeed production.

This project performs a LCA over Gilt-head seabream (Sparus aurata L.) aquaculture depending on... (More)
Aquaculture is the culture of plants, algae or animals that live in aquatic systems. It started being developed in the 50s and it has increased enormously since then. Aquaculture has the potential of mitigating some worldwide problems such as the global hunger and the fishing pressure. However, aquaculture is not perfect and it has several impacts over the environment. In order to assess all of that impacts, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method has been prove to be a good tool in several studies. Some LCAs performed over aquaculture in different fish species have determined that the most important impact contributor is the aquafeed production.

This project performs a LCA over Gilt-head seabream (Sparus aurata L.) aquaculture depending on the aquafeed used. Gilt-head seabream is a common fish species in the Mediterranean which is produced at a rate of 179924 tonnes per year. The main targets of this project is to identify the most important impact contributor for gilt-head seabream aquaculture and to create a new alternative aquafeed for gilt-head seabream that fulfils the nutritional requirements of the fish and decreases the environmental burdens.

After analysing the different protein sources from different aquafeed for gilt-head seabream and other fish species, soybean meal and fish meal were identified as the ones that produce higher impacts and, thus, in the proposed aquafeed they are reduced to the lowest levels. After performing the LCA, it could be seen that aquafeed is the most important impact contributor for gilt-head seabream aquaculture. Several raw materials were tested to substitute them and the ones that fit better for our study due to its nutritional composition and the lower impacts created were blood meal and poultry by-product meal. The main reason for this is the recycling stage implied in the use of poultry by-product meal and blood meal since it is recycled waste from pork and poultry processing. Once that the aquafeed was designed, the gilt-head aquafeed efficiency was compared to other feed efficiencies. The result obtained was a quite low feed efficiency, which means that more feed is used to produce the same amount of biomass.

Lastly, it was concluded that, as in other fish species aquaculture, the most important impact contributor is aquafeed production; poultry by-product meal and blood meal are a good protein source with lower environmental burdens that the ones currently used; and it is also important to increase the aquafeed efficiency in order to reduce the amounts of aquafeed used and, thus, the impacts associated to its production.

Supervisor: Per Carlsson
Master´s Degree Project in Biology 60 credits, 2016
Department of Biology, Lund University (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Calle Lobo, Sergio
supervisor
organization
course
BIOP01 20161
year
type
H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
subject
language
English
id
8892610
date added to LUP
2016-09-28 14:37:00
date last changed
2016-09-28 14:37:00
@misc{8892610,
  author       = {{Calle Lobo, Sergio}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{A Life Cycle Assessment of Gilt-head Seabream (Sparus aurata L.) aquaculture using different fish feeds}},
  year         = {{2016}},
}