More than food: Making seafood more sustainable by using 100% of the fish

From her vantage on the second floor of the Iceland Ocean Cluster house in Reykjavik, right above the fish auction, Alexandra Leeper can look out her window and watch vessels enter the port with the day’s catch. When they arrive, more than 70 different companies await, sprawled across the building’s length — seafood processors, biotech startups, food and beverage purveyors, pharmaceutical innovators and entrepreneurs. They stand ready to make the most of each fish landed from the North Atlantic.

The Iceland cluster has built on the seafood industry’s response to the cod decline of the 1980s, which led to pressing cod livers for their nutritional oil and drying cod heads for cooking. With a concentration on collaboration, those early ideas have developed into an expansive effort to use every last bit of the fish — head, skin, bones, guts and all. The result, Leeper says, is an industry that can turn a fish whose fillets might be worth $12 to $15 into one whose full offerings can be tapped for far greater economic returns. She and her colleagues claim the fully realized value of each cod would approach $5,000, although they acknowledge that’s not necessarily practicable.

Still, their work has reinvigorated Iceland’s blue economy by extending its reach into industries with little historical connection to the sea. Fish skins, for example, are turned into leather for sustainable fashion, or into skin grafts and other wound care products by Kerecis, an Icelandic company recently purchased for $1.3 billion. Collagen is extracted for a growing supplements market and pumped into Collab, a top-selling energy drink in Iceland. Cod enzymes are used by local companies in facial serums and skincare products.

As other regions around the world face down the same fears about declining fish stocks that spurred Iceland into action, the cluster model is catching on in like-minded seafood communities from Oregon, Alaska and the Great Lakes in North America to Namibia, Korea and Queensland, Australia.

Waste not, want not

As she discusses the urgency of maximizing each fish’s value, Leeper points to a World Economic Forum report that found 26.2 million tons of aquatic food were lost or wasted in 2021, accounting for nearly one-sixth of global production. Much of that loss happens at the processing stage, where parts without purpose are discarded, often into landfills where their decay produces greenhouse gases. Instead, the ocean cluster puts them to profitable use.

“[Fishing] takes time. It takes energy. It takes money,” Leeper says. “These are important resources that we shouldn’t waste. There is always a way to create value instead of waste.”

With Iceland’s own cluster delivering on Sigfusson’s vision, Leeper and her colleagues are now working to share what they’ve learned while developing a playbook that can guide others in their own pursuit of whole-fish utilization.

In North America, the distributed fisheries of the Great Lakes, spread across the Midwest and Canada, might seem like a far cry from Reykjavik’s centralized processing hub. But the two have more in common than one might think, says John Schmidt, who leads the 100% Great Lakes Fish Initiative at the Conference of Great Lakes St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers. The whitefish found throughout the region is genetically quite similar to Atlantic cod, as is the experience of fishermen tangling with an uncertain future, Schmidt says: “Stocks are declining. You’re reliant on a historical fishing industry. How can we make more with less?”

The answer, Schmidt and his colleagues have found, is to apply the same “waste not, want not” philosophy that’s been brewing in Iceland for decades. More than half of the 35 million pounds of fish landed in the Great Lakes between 2019 and 2024 was wasted in the form of unused parts, according to the initiative.

Today, more than 40 companies representing 90 percent of the Great Lakes’ commercial catch have signed the 100% Fish pledge, committing to avoid landfilling. Much of that once-wasted material is now being repurposed for lower-value products like animal feed and fertilizer, but the nascent project is developing higher-value uses, ranging from fish leather and pet treats to collagen and protein hydrolysates used in nutritional supplements.

A scientific analysis of key Great Lakes species, including walleye, perch, whitefish and lake trout, offered partners a sense of the possibilities for each fish — the type of insight that leads someone like Schmidt to talk about the potential of swim bladders, a fish organ that supports buoyancy. (The collagen in the bladders of some fish can be used to produce isinglass, a form of gelatin.) The next step, he hopes, is a facility to produce fish meal and fish oil, commodities that could serve as “an engine that pulls the rest of this forward in our region.” Done right, full-fish utilization in the Great Lakes could unlock more than $35 million of annual economic benefits, according to the initiative.

In Oregon, where Dungeness crab is the most valuable fishery and Pacific whiting the largest by volume, Kristen Penner has watched small coastal communities and fishing families struggle to adapt to changes in the ocean and the economy. As a commercial fisherman, she was “absolutely riveted” when she saw Sigfusson speak about 100% Fish at a seafood workshop. Met with the possibility that fish parts she was paying to dispose of could instead bring more value to seafood businesses, the response was clear: “Let’s drop everything and focus on that,” she says. Penner is now regional value chain coordinator for the Oregon Ocean Cluster, which has brought together a seafood economy spanning 14 small ports to explore the potential for innovation.

“Fishermen want future generations to be able to work on the water and provide good, nutrient-dense food for their communities. They don’t want to waste the resource. The idea that there are better ways — that there are actually really amazing and incredible additional products that can come out of this exceptional resource we have here, this natural capital — is profound,” Penner says.

The Oregon Ocean Cluster can’t yet match Iceland’s history and scale, but it shares its predecessor’s vision. At Local Ocean Seafood, a Newport-based restaurant and fish market whose owner, Laura Anderson, is the cluster’s industry adviser, fish skins are made into dog treats and heads are frozen for a seafood stock that will soon be ready for retail. Darlene Khalafi, who leads Local Ocean’s 100% Fish program, says those edible products alone use nearly half of what’s typically wasted in a fillet-only operation; plant food and fertilizer made from bones and other scraps can push the project even further.

The simplest solution

As the 100% Fish movement takes root in industrial settings, the message of whole-fish utilization is also ringing out in other ways. After all, it doesn’t take high-tech machinery and business innovation to simply eat more of each fish that’s caught. As Leeper says, waste-free cooking maximizes the nutritional value of a landed fish. “If that was the pattern the world over, we probably wouldn’t have to fish on such large industrial scales,” she says.