Indian food scientist Renuka Karuppuswamy has considered a more useful purpose for the rotting waste. She had childhood goal to use the seafood waste as food supplement. Her determination has led to a new commercial viable technique for extracting a super food supplement – a powerful antioxidant which protects cells in the human body – from prawn shells.
Renuka is now doing her PhD in the University of New South Wales in Sydney. According to her research millions of tonnes of seafood waste can be turn into the world’s useful commercial health supplement. The extracted antioxidant is called astaxanthin, which gives cooked prawns their red colour. However, almost all the astaxanthin is contained in the shells and heads which are thrown away.
Renuka’s effort give rise to a new technique that not only offers a new source of astaxanthin but an environmentally friendly use for the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of prawn waste generated by processing plants globally each year. It is fact that around 1.44 million tonnes of seafood waste is generated worldwide annually, most of which is dumped in landfill or oceans. According to Renuka this could be of great use.
Renuka’s technique works at lower temperature, recovers more astaxanthin and causes less degradation to the antioxidant than other methods. She opined that her technique would get larger quantities of the antioxidant which means extraction from prawn shells could be commercially viable.
