Today at Aqua Nor 2017, the BioMar Group takes a moment to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the BioSustain™ concept. Sustainability has long been in the DNA of BioMar however the development of BioSustain firmly established the company as the forerunner in driving sustainable innovation through collaborative partnerships in the aquaculture industry.
“At BioMar we are proud of our long history in sustainability”, said Carlos Diaz, CEO BioMar Group, “over a decade ago we recognised the need to find sustainable solutions to fishmeal and fish oil and believed that ‘profit through sustainability’ was possible.”
It was BioMar who pioneered the introduction of extruded fish feed in the 1960’s, which enabled a significant reduction on the negative impact to the local water environment. BioMar created ECOLINE which was the first declared environmentally friendly fish feed in the world, winning the Danish Environmental Award in 1988. Already in 1997 sustainability had become a core strategic pillar for the company and by the launch of the BioSustain concept in 2007, at the Brussels seafood exhibition, BioMar had already established themselves as innovators in the fish feed industry.
The BioSustain concept is the foundation for BioMar’s extensive work and covers sustainability across all three dimensions; economy, environment and society. BioSustain is a dynamic platform that continues to adapt to the fluid environment of stakeholder demands in the aquaculture industry. It was developed in collaboration with BASF and in parallel with DNV’s ProSustain program and today at Aqua Nor 2017, BioMar Group celebrates the 10 year anniversary of this initiative.
The project was born out of the need to reduce the dependence on marine based fishmeal and fish oil and the original concept focused on fish feed solutions for salmon.
“It has long since been possible to replace fishmeal with other protein sources, but we didn’t stop there -We continue to push the innovation frontier and today we can produce fish feeds with zero inclusion of marine ingredients where the fish oil is replaced with microalgae, omega-3 in their native form”, explains Carlos Diaz.
BioMar Group has been a leader in global aquaculture sustainability for over a decade and they continue to raise the bar higher. The next evolution in their BioSustain program is the creation of a fully integrated tool for tracking and measuring sustainability at the sourcing side of the value chain.
“We are currently working on Triple S (Sustainable Solution Steering), which will fundamentally change the way we source raw materials and give us full transparency so that we can measure sustainability at the origin of the value chain,” explains Vidar Gundersen, Global Sustainability Director, BioMar Group.
When completed, Triple S will be the first of its kind in the aquaculture industry and will continue BioMar Group’s long tradition of being at the forefront of the aquaculture sustainable agenda.
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Sustainable Brands Staff
Published Aug 16, 2017 1pm EDT / 10am PDT / 6pm BST / 7pm CEST