Comparative Sustainability of Essential Amino Acids from Rendering Animal Proteins and Vegetable Proteins Used in Three Aquaculture Species

While productivity increases in the production of aquaculture have contributed to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions per unit of production, additional reductions in green-house gas emissions can be attained by modifying the ingredients in the selected studied species, i.e., Nile tilapia, salmon and shrimp diets. In this paper, a baseline diet, for a given studied species, was aggregated from at least four commercial diets to have a better representation of the real world. Then using the same list of feed ingredients, an alternative scenario was defined not only balancing the ration from energy, protein and fat nutrient requirements, and constraining the cap at 150% for individual feed ingredient from the baseline diet but also minimizing the greenhouse gas emission. For all three studied species, 8.4% less plant-based protein meals, 23.9% less grains, and 36.8% more animal protein meals were used in the scenario diet. In consequence, total greenhouse gas emissions was reduced by 15.3% from the baseline diet and total acres of land use was decreased by 20%.