Mr. Raphael Aidoo shares his results Exploring the Circular Bioeconomy Potentials of Industrial Pea Starch- at the NABEC 2023 conference
July 23, 2019
On August 1, 2023, Mr Raphael Aidoo, a Ph.D. student of the SASE research presented on
"Exploring the Circular Bioeconomy Potentials of Industrial Pea Starch: A Case Study for Second Generation single-cell
Protein Production".
In his presentation, Mr Aidoo provided background insight on the growth in pea protein extraction in Canada,
which will generate pea starch co-product, which, if not efficiently utilized, will cause many problems.
He then stressed the need to design sustainable upcycling strategies that would benefit the nation's sustainable
industry agenda and augment economic gains.
He went further to share information about the goal of his presentation, which was to design and assess the sustainability of
the performance of the proposed pea-starch based single cell protein production system and the performance of a consequential
analysis to ascertain the impacts of its utilization as an alternative to for fishmeal and soybean meal. Environmental life cycle
assessment and life cycle costing were the two methods he had applied to achieve the project goal.
In sharing some insights and results from this project, Mr Aidoo shared how the media enrichment step of the upcycling model
had the highest relative environmental contribution across all impact categories. He also shared insights on two
systems he had had compared to a baseline system. In doing this, he found that (single cell protein- organic carbon fo
r microbial preculturing + No media enrichment-SCP ONME) < (single cell protein- no media enrichment -SCP NME)
< BASELINE for CO2 emissions.
Regarding land use the performance of the different systems varied as follows BASELINE < SCP ONME < SCP NME.
Lastly,
regarding water consumption, the different systems performed as follows: SCP ONME < SCP NME < BASELINE.
In concluding the findings of his study, Mr Aidoo share that single cell protein with a synthetic media enrichment
provides competitive ecological and economic benefits, encouraging its integration in the pea processing chain.
Finally, he highlighted that the Canadian Pea Industry could lead to the adoption of pea-starch SCP as a sustainable
circular solution, taking the widely expanding pea production and processing industry and the evolving effort
toward achieving net-zero carbon industry.