Desalination plants installed in the Westman Islands have delivered an unforeseen bonus in the form of reducing the volumes of salt needed to be imported for saltfish production.
For many years the islands off the south of Iceland have relied on an undersea pipeline for the mainland for a supply of fresh water, and it was a wake-up call a few years ago when the seabed pipeline was damaged. As a result a number of companies invested in desalination systems to produce fresh water from sea water. Among these is fishing and processing company Vinnslustöðin, also a leading producer of saltfish.
It wasn’t long before the idea was floated that salt filtered out from sea water by the desalination system could be routed to saltfish production, and Matís was enlisted to look into the food safety implications, as well as potential production levels, costs and sustainability.
Results of the work done by Matís indicate that the recovered salt can be used for brime, used in the pre-salting part of the process, without any adverse effects on the finished product in terms of quality, colour or pH.
Comparative testing showed no negative effects on production rates or yields, while the use of this reclaimed salt also results in a significant drop in production costs as well as reducing environmental impacts, as the brine used for the initial stage of production no longer needs to be made from importaed salt – and this is in addition to the finding that it is more cost-effective to produce fresh water via desalination than to buy it via the pipeline from the mainland.
