AN ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY DECISION-SUPPORT TOOL FOR FISH-FREE AQUAFEED

The U.S. aquaculture value chain—from companies developing alternative ingredients to aquafeed manufacturers and aquaculture farms—lack a scientifically verified and common platform for comparing economic and environmental performance of alternative ingredients (e.g., yeast, bacterial biomass, insect meal, microalgae) versus conventional ingredients (e.g., fish meal, fish oil corn meal, soybean meal, canola oil) for aquaculture feeds. Available tools for evaluating economic costs of conventional aquafeed ingredients lack robust methods for evaluating alternative ingredients. Existing tools also do not consider critical aquaculture performance parameters (e.g., digestibility of ingredients or growth metrics of fish fed the feed) nor do they consider environmental impacts. We are developing an open-access decision-support tool that will help drive innovation, commercialization, adoption and acceptance of more sustainable aquafeeds. Our research will address four inter-related objectives that culminate in developing a decision-support tool: (1) develop a meta-model database of life-cycle assessments (LCA) of alternative aquafeed ingredients compared with conventional ingredients, that will help decision makers compare environmental effects (e.g., marine eutrophication, global warming potential (GWP), freshwater consumption, land use change) of ingredients across LCA studies; (2) develop a meta-model database of techno-economic analysis (TEA) of alternative aquafeed ingredients compared with conventional ingredients that will help decision makers compare economic performance (e.g., least cost formulations, economics of scale) of ingredients across TEA studies; (3) develop a meta-model database of digestibility and nutritional feeding studies on alternative and conventional aquafeed ingredients that will help decision makers compare the  nutritional performance metrics of alternative versus conventional ingredients in aquaculture t hat   will help decision  makers compare the nutritional performance metrics of alternative versus conventional ingredients in aquaculture feeds across studies;. and  (4) develop a decision-support tool, with open-source software, that integrates the three meta-model databases and ingredient-specific process models.