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Regal Springs' Group Sustainability Manager, Elena Piana shares examples and best practices on maximising circularity and optimising by-products for sustainable tilapia production in this short video interview.

Read the full transcript below:

Callum Broadley  I'm thrilled to be joined today by Elena Piana, Group Sustainability Manager at Regal Springs. Elena plays a key role in shaping Regal Springs sustainability strategies, ensuring that the company not only produces premium quality tilapia, but also protects the lakes and communities in which it operates. With a strong focus on innovation and partnerships, she's helping drive responsible agriculture practises that set new industry standards. Eleanor, welcome. Elena Piana  Hi Callum, thank you for the introduction. I'm really glad to be here and thank you for the opportunity to talk about how we do sustainability at Regal Springs. Callum Broadley Let's dive in. What best practises does Regal Springs implement to promote the well-being of its tilapia, and how do these measures contribute to both environmental and economic sustainability? Elena Piana Yeah. Thank you. Callum, that's already important topic, right? Because when we talk about welfare, first, we talk about making sure that we protect animals that are being recognised as ancient beings by science. So, we must always remember that we, you know, applying respect to the livestock we deal with, it's very important. It's important in land animals. And so it's important on for fish as well. In Regal Springs, we take an approach that includes the whole life cycle. OK, so we're really focused from the moment the Brookstone produces the eggs and the eggs hatch to the very last step when we take them out of the water and they're ready for going to the processing plant to produce our fillets and our product.   But I think what's different in Regal Springs compared to our tilapia companies that we know like the whole industry knows really, that there's one step of this cycle, this cycle that is very sensitive and is the step when you take them out. And you'll bring them to the processing plant. The fish can be exposed to environments that are not their natural environment for long periods of time. So what you really want to do is to minimise their suffering at that stage. And what we did was to partner with a Scottish-based technology provider for starting standing equipment. And we developed an in water. Electric standard that allows us to render the fish unconscious very, very quickly, as soon as they're taken out of the water, what that means is that they are not exposed to those long periods of time where they are experiencing crowded conditions, low oxygen, where they're rubbing against each other and it's just not good for their health. And it's not good for their quality either. So massive improvement on fish welfare thanks to this new standard that have been implemented in all our operations in Indonesia, Honduras and Mexico. The big surprise after we the spanners, were completely operational. The big surprise came in out of two areas. The first one is about health and safety, because what we found was that when you try to kill a fish that is still not completely unconscious, the fish moves around and it's very painful for them. But it's also dangerous for the people who are there. Trying to finish that last stage because the fish is swapping around and. You know they can get injured when in their race, then their arms, the fish are big and they're heavy. And so health and safety has improved. And the other thing that we found is that because the process is so smooth and there's no flopping around, we are using a lot less chlorine for this infection. So that's good for the environment as well. Callum Broadley  Amazing. And how is your company maximising circularity in the tilapia value chain, especially when it comes to buying products and waste reduction? Elena Piana Thank you, Callum. Last year we launched the Natural Addition division. So that's a whole new division led by our European Managing director, Petra. And what we're doing with that division is to aim for a target of 100% utilisation of any byproduct that is produced from the processing of the fish. That not only makes of course, business sense, because you don't want to throw away parts that can actually be used, but we live in a world where resources are scarce and are becoming scarce. So we really need to find all the ways possible to use every part of the fish, and that's what we're doing. Actually, we are already doing regularly well; we use 95% or 96% sometimes of the fish in all our operations. So we have just a couple of byproducts that we are finding hard to. Extract from the processing plant. In the process there in place, and we're addressing that. But not only that, we and this is where the sustainability in the communities really come in. And I believe this is quite a unique approach. The regal strings take what we do is to integrate community work into the circularity concept. And with that, I mean that when you're trying to do something new and you're trying to produce new by product, it can be quite a high risk. Stage is expensive. Sometimes you don't know which way it goes, but what it goes, it goes really well. You have a unique product, a high value product and so we train when we have an idea or someone comes to us with a new technology to elevate the value of this by product, we put money into the communities and we carry groups that we train so that they learn new skills. So, we get to see how the new process works while they are trained and when the market opens up. These communities can actually tap into the market. And create a new source of revenue. We have some examples in Indonesia where some communities and groups have started to use fish skins to produce local snacks. We also have example in Honduras where we have worked with a company that produces leather from fish skins and we've been training a large group of women to utilise these processes to make leather out of fish skin so these skins can now be going into a higher value market and the group obviously can generate some source of income and a better source of income for themselves. Callum Broadley Amazing, fantastic work and Regal Springs has long been a leader in sustainable agriculture. Can you share how this company reinforces its commitment to transparency and innovation in sustainable tilapia farming? Elena Piana   Yeah. So obviously sustainability is a relatively new concept in the industry. I don't know, can we say maybe that we're looking at just, we've really been looking at sustainability as opposed in the last 15 years, I would guess. Although yes, of course, certification standards are a little bit earlier, but Regal Springs has been around for over 30 years over 35 years at this point and. The very first day that the company was established in Indonesia, sustainability was already at the core. The business model and from the very first day work in the communities was completely integrated in the operations. First of all, we have this really long history of knowing how to work with this communities, and that commitment is renewed and announced every year really. So as we get better and better with understanding the intricacies between environmental sustainability and social sustainability,. Regal Springs continues to integrate and refine this concept to maximise resilience against climate change, which is very important today and generally resilience for to address all the resources shortages that the communities face. For example, we work in places where there is fresh water. Scarcity. Sometimes an issue, is going to continue to be an issue. And well, when we work with these communities and we design projects, we try to address things in a very comprehensive manner. So we don't just look at improving our water usage efficiency, but we also work with them to install biophiltres in the houses and make sure that also the communities that share our watershed are more efficient in accessing possible water and using it. Right now, for example, we're also trying to. Restart a project that we had sponsored some years ago and then. It didn't quite work out, so we're looking at that again, and what we're trying to do is to take a collaborative approach to enhance this talk of a freshwater species of fish in Lake Toba in Indonesia, because we know that the traffic level of this fish allows this fish to absorb a lot of the nitrogen in the fish. But if this stock is also managed responsibly,. It provides a source of revenue for those communities. And so we're also doing that. Those are sometimes quite complex projects, but that is how you really get the value of long-term sustainability in the use of resources that we share. Callum Broadley Thank you so much for your time today, Elena. And we can't wait to hear more from you at the summit. Elena Piana   Thank you, Callum. My pleasure.