Assessment of heavy metals and PAHs in fish waste valorisation for nutraceutical purposes

This study presents results on contaminant quantifications for the food safety of initial biomass (fish waste) and its extract product (fish oil) resulting from the activities carried out within the VITADWASTE project. VITADWASTE is a PRIN (Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale) project funded by Italian Ministry of University Education and Research, which aims to use a multidisciplinary and sustainable approach to transform biological waste into a valuable resource, to develop a safe and effective vitamin D3 nutraceutical product for human use, based on the principles of circular economy and bioeconomy. Fish waste includes by-products such as bones, guts, heads, skin and fins, or species below the minimum conservation size and tissues not suitable for human consumption, which together account for about 20-80% of the total catches and therefore improving the management of such biomass is essential. In the VITADWASTE project, an innovative green extraction method has been developed to recover vitamin D3 from fish waste, to produce a fish oil usable for nutraceutical implementations. Here, the results of Heavy Metals (HMs) and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) concentrations are reported in the fish wastes and the fish oil according to the EU regulation. The consistently low concentrations of contaminants, always within regulatory limits, confirm the safety of both the raw material and the extracted product for human use, and support the adoption of SFE as a sustainable and efficient strategy for the valorisation of marine biomass within a circular economy framework