Waste not, want not: Would you wear shoes made of fish?
Most of every fish taken out of the ocean is thrown away, but there's cash in finding ways to use the waste
A look at Jamie-Lee Cormier's brightly coloured leather earrings and bracelets reveals something unexpected: the leather has scales.
That's because it's made with Newfoundland cod leather.
"Everyone's always really amazed when they see it," said the crafts producer who sells her products online. .
Though it may seem weird to Cormier's Canadian customers, fish leather has been making a splash on international runways for a few years.
Christian Dior, Prada and Nike have all been experimenting with fish leather products, from shoes to handbags. It's part of a growing worldwide movement to reduce waste in commercial fisheries and to make more money using less fish.
For those following innovation in sustainable fisheries development, it probably comes as no surprise that these fashion houses are getting their fish leather from Iceland.
'Doing more with less'
"[Iceland] is focused on value from the entire fish," said Carey Bonnell, head of the School of Fisheries at the Marine Institute in St. John's.
"They have a strategy right now in Iceland to get more value from the traditional waste stream than from the fillet. That's a paradigm shift for them and for the industry as a whole," he said in an interview.
"They plan to get more from the oils from the skins, from the heads from the livers, to go into pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, and biomedical type applications, skincare products, you name it."
Using more of the fish byproducts -- the parts of the fish that normally go in the garbage — is all part of Iceland's efforts to make more money with less fish, particularly with cod.
It's a strategy Bonnell hopes will adopted in Newfoundland and Labrador as the cod slowly comes back.
"As we get critical mass, as we get scale, as our stocks continue to rebound – we hope – that's the kind of model we need to look at in terms of full utilization, maximizing production, maximizing value per kilo of catch. Doing more with less."
- What if the cod came back? The push to reinvent Newfoundland and Labrador's fishery
- This robot can process a crab in seconds, and it might actually save rural jobs
Bonnell says the real driving force behind Iceland's innovation with byproducts is the Iceland Ocean Cluster Centre, in Reykjavík's old harbour. It's a home to researchers and an incubator for seafood companies who are working to get more value from each fish pulled from the water.
What about the other two thirds of the fish?
"A fillet is just 30 or 35 per cent of the fish," said Wade Murphy, who runs the Marine Institute's Bioprocessing Facility on Mount Scio Road in St. John's.
"If all our product is sold as fillet, well, what are you doing with the rest of it?"
If all our product is sold as fillet, well, what are you doing with the rest of it?- Wade Murphy
Murphy and his team of researchers work with harvesters and processors to look at extending shelf life, improving packaging and developing entirely new products from the unused parts of the fish.
They take a byproduct — like cod livers — and start by looking for a food application. Lately, they've been looking at whether there's a viable market for fresh Newfoundland cod livers and cod roe.
If that fails, they move up the value chain to explore possible pharmaceutical, nutraceutical or medical uses.
In the case of cod livers, they've been looking at the concentration of omega-3 fats in cod liver oil.
They're also trying to determine whether they can extract collagen from sea cucumber shells.
Turning shrimp into gold
So far, their most successful projects have been with shrimp.
Astaxanthin is the pigment that gives shrimps its red colour. It's also a powerful antioxidant. The researchers have been extracting and analyzing the astaxanthin from N.L. shrimp to see if it measures up.
They've also been turning shrimp shells into medical-grade chitosan, a fine white powder which has anti-inflammatory properties.
It's used in bandages for burn victims and for other biomedical uses such as helping in bone repair. It can also be used in cosmetics as a wrinkle filler, and it can be sprayed onto food to extend its shelf life.
Carefully emptying a box of petri dishes filled with ground shells, Julia Pohling, a biotechnologist at the lab, refers to the chitosan as "the gold" because it nets such high profits on the market.
Lower quotas affecting research
Though they see a lot of potential in these products, plummeting shellfish quotas have affected their raw material supply and their shellfish projects are temporarily on hold.
Murphy thinks that's exactly the wrong response to lower quotas – that now is the ideal time for industry to start shifting its focus toward by-products.
"With shrimp, they're only taking 30 per cent of the fish. Seventy per cent of it is being tossed," he said.
"What a time now to go back and say, hey, let's give you a way to utilize that shell, and extract value from what you're throwing away."
Cormier thinks fish leather has a lot of potential. It's tough stuff, she said, and it can by dyed with bright, vibrant colours.
"The back is really grainy and has a lot of fibrous pieces, but the front is really smooth and pretty and almost resembles snakeskin even. I think they put some sort of glaze in the tanning process to keep the scales down."
- Read more articles by Sarah Smellie
- The Broadcast: Highlights and full programs to hear with host Jane Adey
She's almost out of her supply — she got it years ago from a woman in Corner Brook who bought it from a small tannery in Nova Scotia.
She's hoping that by the time she needs to find more, she'll be able to order it from an entrepreneur who's set up shop in Newfoundland.
