Turning Seafood Waste into Something More Valuable

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Contributed by Dr. Francesca Kerton, Associate Professor at Memorial University, for the ACS GCI What's Your Green Chemistry? Campaign

Our research group is busy trying to make fish and seafood waste into something else – hopefully one day we will turn it into something more valuable. Nowadays, when we have finished eating a shrimp or crab dish – the shells go into the trash and off to a landfill site. With space in landfills becoming less readily available, we can try to turn our waste into something else. In our case, this something else is a new chemical building block that we could turn into a new disease-fighting drug or into a new plastic.

Chemicals are all around us in daily life (including the parts of this computer that I am using to write this blog post). To me it seems obvious to take one problem, waste, and to use it to solve another problem, making the objects we need and use everyday. In this way, we can all live a little bit more sustainability and take better care of our planet.

The Green Chemistry and Catalysis Group at Memorial University

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