MiAlgae, a Scottish biotech start-up firm, turns waste from the whisky industry into a sustainable source of omega-3 for feeding to farmed fish and pets
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00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 I'm Julian Pietrzyk, and I'm the head of technical transfer
00:14 at Myalgi.
00:15 Myalgi is a biotech SME founded in 2016.
00:20 And the idea really was to have a biotech company
00:23 with a focus on circular economy,
00:25 specifically in Scotland.
00:26 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:31 So at the moment, there's a global shortfall
00:33 of omega-3s of about 1 million tons a year.
00:37 And we've got the Scottish whiskey industry generating,
00:40 I think, annually about 3 billion liters of co-product.
00:44 And with the circular economy spin,
00:46 we try to marry up that surplus and that demand.
00:49 My name is Pablo Chisbert, and I'm an R&D scientist
00:53 at Myalgi.
00:53 First time I heard about Myalgi was while I was doing my MSc
00:58 in industrial biotechnology.
00:59 And it was actually a speaker from Zero Waste Scotland
01:03 that introduced us to Myalgi.
01:05 At Myalgi, we produce omega-3.
01:07 It's an alternative source to the current method
01:10 that is being produced.
01:11 It's more sustainable, and it's competitively priced.
01:16 The usual source of omega-3s that we generally have
01:19 is from fish oil, which really is just minced up fish.
01:23 And instead, what we try and do is we try and skip out
01:26 that middleman, because fish don't actually
01:28 make their own omega-3s.
01:29 It's all in their diet and the algae that they eat.
01:32 So we are able to grow this microalgae on these co-products
01:36 from the whiskey industry, and we harvest
01:38 that very rich omega-3 biomass.
01:41 With Zero Waste Scotland, in the early days,
01:43 we had a bit of support funding from them,
01:46 but also quite a lot of good advice
01:47 from their bioeconomy team.
01:49 And then we heard about the circular economy investment
01:51 fund, which looks fantastic, because it helps with capital
01:54 costs for equipment.
01:56 We did the expression of interest for that.
01:58 Then we went through to the full application.
02:01 And then when we got that cash, we
02:03 had matched private investment funding,
02:06 and that helped to really expand our commercial demonstrator.
02:10 We went from a single 30,000-liter tank
02:12 to eight 30,000-liter tanks, along with all the downstream
02:16 processing equipment and all the infrastructure as well.
02:19 When I first joined the company, I
02:21 was mostly based at the demonstrator site in Balfron.
02:26 And later on, I moved to a more tech transfer and R&D role
02:31 here in Edinburgh.
02:32 I'm aware that part of my salary was partially funded as well
02:36 by Zero Waste Scotland.
02:38 In terms of the scope 3 emissions,
02:39 we're actually in a very good starting place,
02:42 as we work with a lot of very like-minded businesses.
02:45 So our main feedstock actually comes from the whiskey
02:48 distillery and the whiskey industry.
02:51 And they have all pledged to be net zero by 2040.
02:55 My advice, really, for anyone that
02:56 was looking to incorporate any kind of circular economy
02:58 model in their business would really
03:00 be to look for those opportunities,
03:02 because really, they are all around.
03:05 So many large industries have surplus, like co-products,
03:08 that they are now having to either pay to get rid of,
03:11 or are spreading it on land, or there
03:13 are environmental impacts to it.
03:15 So you don't have to look too hard to find them.
03:18 And it is pretty daunting, because there's a lot of R&D.
03:21 Trust me, there's a lot of R&D in that.
03:23 But again, we're always open for collaborations.
03:26 And there are several other Scottish organisations
03:28 that are also collaborating with several of these industries
03:31 to try and tackle these environmental issues.
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