“To be honest, our production processes are actually quite straightforward”, explains Lars Aashammer, CEO of Biosirk Norge. “We receive leftovers from the meat industry or fallen stock, which we feed into an industrial crusher. The resulting mass is then treated with extensive heat between 122-134 °C to sterilize it and evaporate all the water. Naturally, this is a highly energy-intensive step, but a necessary one for now. Once all the moisture is gone, we use a screw press to separate the fat from the meat-and-bone meal: our finished products.” The extracted fat is then burnt to generate steam in factories or sold to a Danish start-up company that uses it for biodiesel. The company’s category one and two meat-and-bone meal is used as a renewable fuel source to generate energy by Biosirk Norge’s customers, or as a more sustainable substitute for less environmentally friendly raw materials in Norway’s cement industry. “Category three bone meal is where it starts to get truly interesting”, explains Lars Aashammer, before acknowledging significant regulatory hurdles: “Most of the bone meal we produce currently goes to pet food, which isn’t bad. Naturally, though, it would be more sustainable and profitable to use it for feeding livestock in the meat industry. Currently, the European Union is the only major world region that bans this, a legacy of the decades-old mad-cow disease scare that still shapes European food production legislation.” Other global markets have begun to react to said restrictions, with Vietnam recently restricting bone meal imports: a move that quickly sent prices tumbling. 

Closing the Loop

The legal exception made for using bone meal in aquafood production meanwhile provides an opening into a new profitable market: “In the near future, we plan to supply Norwegian salmon producers with poultry meal – but as a relatively small company, we will only be able to provide them with a fraction of the amounts they really need. If we are successful, though, we intend to scale up our capacity to meet more and more of the salmon industry’s demand”, says Lars Aashammer. A scale-up that may also increase the sustainability of Biosirk Norge’s own production processes. “Our current volumes are so small that we haven’t transformed our production to the wet method which is largely used in Europe these days, because it is somewhat more energy-efficient. We may do so with increasing levels of output in the future”, explains Lars Aashammer. Regardless of overcoming regulatory restrictions and seizing new market opportunities, Biosirk Norge’s overall ambition will remain the same: “Our mission is to close the loop in the meat industry by turning raw materials that used to be discarded into something valuable”, Lars Aashammer concludes: “That is what drives every one of us at Biosirk Norge.”