Ramkumar Nair, CEO of Mycorena.
Mycorena takes fish food production from lab to tens of thousands of tonnes
Mycorena is first among the companies supported by the LignoCity2.0 project to reach the market faster with better results. Their fish feed made from waste streams from paper mills should now be scaled up from lab level to thousands of tonnes.
Mycorena uses waste streams from the paper mill Nordic Paper in Bächammar to create bio-based fish feed.
Imagine a circular economy, where everything is used and nothing is wasted. One of the companies contributing to this is the newly started Mycorena. What started as a research study is today a start-up company that is looking to open its production facility in LignoCity’s premises in Bäckhammar.
The test plant is in close proximity to the Nordic Paper mill, where Mycorena receives water from the production residual streams. The water, in turn, is used to grow a fungal-based protein.
“When the fungus eats the residual particles in the water, it grows. At the same time, the water is purified and can be returned to the mill’s paper production. More circular than it can hardly be”, says Ramkumar Nair, as one of Mycora’s founders.
Fast entry into the industry
Mycorena will now, with the help of ÅF Pöyry, build its first production facility in LignoCity’s premises to produce fish food. They thus go from a lab environment to an expected production of thousands of tonnes by 2021.
The fact that Mycorena has managed to get from lab to scale up so quickly is few.
“It is usually a long journey of several years. It requires contacts”, explains Erik Dahlén, innovation advisor at Paper Province.
It was he who piloted Mycorena on to LignoCity2.0, a project run by RISE, Paper Province, Närsam and Karlstad University. In this way, they have been given access to the unique work package GO, which aims to shorten the way to the market.
“Mycorena are pioneers. They are the first to join the GO scale. It is the third and final package in GO and is about scaling up. We have now taken a first step towards a accurate pre-plan for the LignoCity plant,”, says Erik Dahlén.
Read more about Mycorena and the innovation here!
