BLUECC: Commercial exploitation of marine collagen and chitin from marine sources

Due to the increased global population, the world will face competition for limited and finite natural resources. On the other hand, the amount of biowaste is increasing and is estimated to be 138 million tons per year in the EU. Also, there are large amounts of underutilized animal species. Both aspects can give us opportunities for developing innovative products. The BlueCC project aims to take underutilized species, by-catch and cleaner fish from the aquaculture industry to develop new marine ingredients and products, based on chitin and collagen in a sustainable way. BlueCC will exploit underutilized marine raw materials from laboratory to prototype demonstration, to reach collagen and chitin-based bioactive demonstrators with potential commercial uses reaching the TRL7. BlueCC will be carried out by an interdisciplinary team of researches across Europe: Ghent University (B), ILVO (B), Chalmers University (Se), Nofima AS (No) (Coordinator), NRC (It), Fraunhover Institute (Ge), BlueBio Alliance Direction (Pt), PharmaTech AS (No), and is funded within by ERANET Marine Biotech.