What We Do
At CuanTec, we have three over-arching principles, which we constantly work to improve to enable us to provide the best chitin and chitosan:
Firstly, we constantly work with our raw material suppliers, whether it is crustacean byproduct or other consumables, to secure the highest level of traceability of our feedstock. We are working to increase traceability as far back the supply chain as possible, to as granular a level as possible.
Secondly, our traceability activities will be complemented with a professional, quality-based management culture across the business to ensure safe, highly-traceable Chitosan and Chitin products. Our urgent intent is to achieve the third-party appropriate ISO (9001, 14001 and 45001) accreditation together with the necessary HACCP activities.
Finally, recognising that our customers have specific technical specification requirements for their own needs, our production facility is flexible enough to be able to "change recipes" in order to meet these specific requirements. It is important for CuanTec that we can develop and produce to these high standards.
While these are our basic business principles, CuanTec continues to be a Bioscience business, therefore we continue to innovate, and with partners, to develop novel useful products and applications for them. For example, we have developed a number of exciting formats, such as a film to replace plastic using chitosan as its source material.
We are passionate that a new form of the economy, the bioeconomy, together with uncompromising standards of traceability and management culture will see customers, investors, stakeholders and society value the preservation of our environment as much as traditional monetary value.
Avoiding Carbon Dioxide Emissions
Huge volumes of shellfish waste are currently produced each year, amounting to totals of up to 150 billion tonnes globally. This not only incurs significant costs for businesses, an estimated £10 trillion spent on waste each year, but also comes at a significant environmental cost. Today, these forms of shellfish waste are incinerated or put in landfill, emitting damaging CO2 into the atmosphere;
CuanTec’s process and business helps avoid the emissions associated with the disposal of the shellfish waste by using and valorising the shell byproducts, meaning these wastes are not incinerated or placed in landfill.
Reduce Plastic Pollution
We’ve all seen the heart wrenching images of wildlife tangled in man-made materials that litter their habitats. We've heard how they ingest microplastics as if they were nutritious plankton, and humans consume this plastic from eating seafood.
The world is creaking under the weight of more than 50 years of plastic pollution. By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish by weight. Much of this waste comes from single use plastic, such as food packaging.
Our innovative food packaging material is biodegradable and compostable and returns its natural components to the environment, without leaving a trace. We use natural materials to create our product, and it will return to nature without causing any harm.
Future products with innovative Chitin and Chitosan uses
Chitin and Chitosan have many properties which are of use across many sectors- from water purification for use in agriculture and industry to food preservation for packaged goods to therapeutic benefits for the rapidly growing cosmetic, health and beauty and even biomedical categories
While, on the one hand, Cuantec is up-cycling the shell byproduct and so reducing disposal and its associated environmental costs, on the other hand it is also working on multiple innovation projects with parties to identify applications for successful use across many of these categories.
Our packaging material, CuanSave™, also directly saves food waste. Chitosan has antimicrobial properties. This means it can cause an shelf life extension of foods wrapped within it. By allowing food, such as fresh salmon to stay fresher for longer, customers will have more time to eat it before it passes the "use by date".
Preventing food waste does not only prevent waste. It also can reduce green house gas emissions and save money for food producers, retailers and consumers alike.
Circular Economy
In nature, there is no waste - everything has a purpose...and if we look closely, everything has some functional benefits which can be used, if understood correctly.
As a society, we are moving away from the linear “take, make, dispose of” mentality and moving towards a circular economy, where the “waste” from one process becomes a valued by-product for another customer, perhaps in a very different industry.
At CuanTec, we take the by-products from the shellfish industry and use them in our gentle, biological process to extract pure, high quality chitin and Chitosan for supply to multiple industries, for which crustacean-based Chitin and Chitosan have specific, unique, functional attributes
