At the PPI Awards gala at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels on Nov. 29, 2017, Björn Alriksson, Processum, Sweden, received a statuette as proof of Processum winning in the category "The Innovation in Cellulosic Applications Award." Processum received this award for its work over many years to develop a technique for production of a single cell protein made from forest industry residual streams to be used in fish feed.

PPI Awards is arranged by RISI and could be described as the Oscars for the forest industry. This prestigious competition is divided into 10 categories out of which "The Innovation in Cellulosic Applications Award" was added this year. With this category, RISI wants to highlight work going on to develop new use of cellulose close to the consumers as well as show the versatile possibilities offered by our forests. The fact that fish feed in the future might be a product produced at a biorefinery or pulp mill was apparently exciting such that the jury chose Processum as winner. 

 "We find it amazing that we received a PPI Award for our long-standing research to develop methods for production of single cell protein from pulp mills’ residual streams," said Björn Alriksson, group manager, Biotechnology, Processum. "It is an honor which we share with all involved parties in a number of projects, which in different ways brought the idea to produce single cell protein for use in fish feed from laboratory scale to showing that it works in demonstration scale and will be a satisfactory fish feed.

"This protein has been used in fish feed which has been tested on living fish. The trials were very successful, showing that traditional fish feed, which e.g. consists of other fish taken from oceans with rapidly decreasing amounts of fish, can be replaced by fish feed based on single cell protein from the forest industry.

"Currently we participate in three projects aimed to bring this technique even closer to large scale production. Salmonaid is a Swedish project, ProffAqua a Nordic project, and Sylfeed a European project. An important part of Sylfeed is to build a demonstration plant with a capacity of 5,000 metric tons of forest biomass annually at Norske Skog Golbey.

"We are really pleased to see that what started as laboratory trials soon will be on dinner tables. That our work also has won the prestigious PPI Award, just as we previously won the EARTO Innovation Prize in 2014, is the icing on the cake," said Alriksson.

 

In the photo below are (l-r): Anne de Baetzelier, host for the evening; Björn Alriksson, Processum; and Jukka Kantola, partner-CEO of NC Partnering, who sponsored the category  "The Innovation in Cellulosic Applications Award."