Citation : Bruno Iñarra, Carlos Bald, Marta Cebrian (2017). DiscardLess WP6.2 Evaluation of the different valorisation alternatives prioritized from the technical, market, regulatory and socio-economic perspective.

DiscardLess will help provide the knowledge, tools and technologies as well as the involvement of the stakeholders to achieve the gradual elimination of discard.

This document is the second deliverable in work package six (WP6) of the DiscardLess project, which aims to contribute to the gradual elimination of the discards in the European fisheries, in agreement with the reformed Common Fisheries Policy of the EU and the implementation of the landing obligation (LO). The work package deals with how unavoidable, unwanted catches (UUC) can be utilised once they have been landed. The first step in that work, described on deliverable 6.1, has been to provide an overview of current and expected supplies of UUC, where and when they will be landed, what are the available facilities and how the set-up is at the landing harbours to cope with changing supplies effected by the LO. In this second document, an extensive review of most suitable uses of UUC has been performed, based on bibliographic results, current experiences and works performed by DiscardLess partners.

There is a broad range of possibilities to valorise fish and fish compounds, however, not all the solutions are able to deal with the huge variability of the expected landings.

LO states that only UUC above Minimum Conservation Reference Size can be used for human consumption, but there is a need of designing new fish products that avoid a market overflow. All the other catches need to be properly managed but their profitability must be subjected to the avoidance of incentivizing by-catches.

To facilitate the selection of the most suitable option in each scenario a detailed data sheet of more than 30 valorisations processes have been filled including aspects related with the, infrastructure aspects, market and economic aspects, regulatory aspects…

The selection of the most suitable option may need the evaluation of more than 15 parameters grouped in 3 categories, technical, market and economic aspects. The obtaining of allCollecting the data needed and the subsequent studies can be very time consuming and expensive.

For that reason, a simplified methodology for the selection of most suitable uses of UUC in different scenarios has been described. In brief, all the selection parameters haves been summarized in 6 criteria grouped in 3 categories and a set of prioritization criteria set up. A three steps procedure has been described to perform a preliminary selection with a minimum quantity of information.

Finally, the results summarized in deliverable 6.1 and 6.2 have been used to select most suitable uses of UUC in the case studies of Bay of Biscay (harbour of Ondarroa), North Sea (Danish fleet) and Iceland.

The role of Iceland in this report is to provide an example of where a LO has been successfully in effect for decades.