MP11A Case Studies on Fisheries Products
C120-122
1:20 PM - 4:40 PM, Monday
() Environmental effects of wild caught cod, farmed salmon and chicken − possible to compare?
Ellingsen, H1, Schau, E.1, 2, Aanondsen, S.1, Pedersen, T.2, 1 SINTEF Fisheries and aquaculture, Trondheim, Norway2 Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
ABSTRACT- Environmental effects of food production are increasingly focussed, also when it comes to fish. Not only the content and the quality of the fish as food are important to the consumers. The environmental effects of catching or farming, processing and transport to the marked are becoming important issues as well. Introduction of various environmental labels combined with requirements versus trace-ability is expected to take place in the near future. Environmental requirements are however not always easy to define or quantify, and for most customers environmental declarations will be impossible to re-examine. Development of objective criteria for what are environmental friendly and what are not is thus expected to be of increased importance for the fisheries sector in the near future. On this background a screening is performed in order to assess and compare environmental effects of cod fishing and salmon farming with chicken farming. Comparison with chicken is assumed to be of interest as both cod, salmon and chicken products are substitutes in the grocery cabinets. It should be a reasonable assumption that these foodstuffs easily can be selected at the sacrifice of the others if the choice is influenced by information regarding environmental effects. This work has aimed at contributing to a more operable concept of sustainability by searching for reference levels for environmental impacts within the fish and food sector. An additional aim has been to investigate how application of various environmental indicators or analysis methods combined with focus on various environmental effects means for the results and conclusions. Energy use, eutrophication and land use effects are investigated. The goal has not been to pinpoint one of these food chains as less environmental efficient than the others, but to establish a better foundation for improvements of the methodology and further analyses.
Key words: fishery, environmental screening, salmon farming, chicken farming