Aðalbjörg Birna Guttormsdóttir, master's student in environmental science at the University of Iceland will today, at 15:15 in room V-157 in VR2, defend their master's thesis in environmental and resource science. The master's thesis bears the name Life Cycle Assessment on Icelandic cod product based on two different fishing methods.
Aðalbjörg's project is carried out in collaboration with Matís, the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Iceland and the fisheries companies Vísir hf and Fisk Seafood hf. The excerpt from the dissertation states, among other things:
Life cycle analysis (LCA) enables us to get a complete picture of the life cycle of a product or service. In this MS project, 1 kg of lightly salted loose-frozen cod fillets with red and bone caught with bottom trawls on the one hand and on the line on the other are compared. Information was collected from two Icelandic fisheries companies, FISK Seafood, which owned and operated the trawler Hegranes SK and Vísi hf, which owns and operates the liner Kristín ÞH. Data were collected from the processing sites of both companies, FISK Seafood in Sauðárkrókur and Vísir hf in Þingeyri. The product was then transported from processing through transport to Seville in Spain where the product is sold. The main results are that cod caught in bottom trawls have a significantly greater environmental impact within all the environmental factors that were taken into account. The greatest environmental impact is to be found in the fisheries themselves, which is due to the vessels' use of oil. To catch 1 kg of the finished product, the fishing vessel with the bottom trawl burns 1.1 liters of oil while a liner uses 0.36 liters. There is also a significant environmental impact within the cold stores, as the processing takes place mainly due to the refrigerants used there. The transport of the product is also a major factor in the environmental impact, as the product is transported by refrigerated long distances and transported by sea in refrigerated containers to Europe with the associated environmental impact. So-called soot traces were calculated, which indicate greenhouse gas emissions converted into carbon dioxide equivalents. The footprint of 1 kg of cod caught by bottom trawl is 5.14 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent, while the footprint of the same amount of longline cod is 1.58 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent.