On 28 November, a Virgin Atlantic flight took off from Heathrow Airport to New York’s JFK using pure Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). “This lower carbon intensive fuel is produced from waste vegetable oils” ministers and journalists commented. Waste, really?
In a world where resources are becoming increasingly scarce, we are now all competing for the same materials: oils used to be a waste in the 1970s. At best, they’d be recycled and used as lubricants. They are no longer. Fish oils used to have close to no value. This year they have surged to new record-high prices per metric ton.
Competition is everywhere. Vegetable oils are needed to decarbonise transport. They are also increasingly used to diversify the food and feed ingredients baskets. Marine oils are highly sought after by the aquaculture sector but also by the pharmaceutical industry and the growing pet food market.
Every single drop of fish oil and every gram of fishmeal is now utilized, leading availability of those precious resources to take centre stage in business strategies. An example is the shrimp farming sector, which IFFO explored at its annual conference earlier this year: in the past, diseases were the primary concern alongside changes within climatic conditions. Today, profitability increasingly depends upon feed efficiency in intensive farming strategies.
Again we see that these nutritional key ingredients find their way to where they are most efficient.
The December newsletter included: