2021-07-042021-07-04Recirculating Aquaculture Is Possible without Major Energy Tradeoff: Life Cycle Assessment of Warmwater Fish Farming in Sweden Kristina Bergman, Patrik J. G. Henriksson, Sara Hornborg, Max Troell, Louisa Borthwick, Malin Jonell, Gaspard Philis, and Friederike Ziegler Environmental Science & Technology 2020 54 (24), 16062-16070 DOI: 10. 1021/acs. est. 0c01100.1520-5851https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12348/4760Seafood is seen as promising for more sustainable diets. The increasing production in land-based closed Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RASs) has overcome many local environmental challenges with traditional open net-pen systems such as eutrophication. The energy needed to maintain suitable water quality, with associated emissions, has however been seen as challenging from a global perspective. This study uses Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to investigate the environmental performance and improvement potentials of a commercial RAS farm of tilapia and Clarias in Sweden. The environmental impact categories and indicators considered were freshwater eutrophication, climate change, energy demand, land use, and dependency on animal-source feed inputs per kg of fillet. We found that feed production contributed most to all environmental impacts (between 67 and 98%) except for energy demand for tilapia, contradicting previous findings that farm-level energy use is a driver of environmental pressures. The main improvement potentials include improved by-product utilization and use of a larger proportion of plant-based feed ingredients. Together with further smaller improvement potential identified, this suggests that RASs may play a more important role in a future, environmentally sustainable food system.PDFCC-BY-4.0animal derived foodFishJournal Articlehttps://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.0c01100