Affiliations 

  • 1 RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Agrifood and Bioscience, P. O. Box 5401, 402 29 Göteborg, Sweden
  • 2 Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 104 05 Stockholm, Sweden
  • 3 Department of Biological Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Larsgårdsvegen 2, 6009 Ålesund, Norway
Environ Sci Technol, 2020 12 15;54(24):16062-16070.
PMID: 33251804 DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.0c01100

Abstract

Seafood is seen as promising for more sustainable diets. The increasing production in land-based closed Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RASs) has overcome many local environmental challenges with traditional open net-pen systems such as eutrophication. The energy needed to maintain suitable water quality, with associated emissions, has however been seen as challenging from a global perspective. This study uses Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to investigate the environmental performance and improvement potentials of a commercial RAS farm of tilapia and Clarias in Sweden. The environmental impact categories and indicators considered were freshwater eutrophication, climate change, energy demand, land use, and dependency on animal-source feed inputs per kg of fillet. We found that feed production contributed most to all environmental impacts (between 67 and 98%) except for energy demand for tilapia, contradicting previous findings that farm-level energy use is a driver of environmental pressures. The main improvement potentials include improved by-product utilization and use of a larger proportion of plant-based feed ingredients. Together with further smaller improvement potential identified, this suggests that RASs may play a more important role in a future, environmentally sustainable food system.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.