Introduction
Jealsa is a leading company in the market of canned fish that operates in Europe, Central and South America. Founded in 1958 in Boiro, Ria de Arousa, over the course of time, they have managed by-products to reduce costs, wastes and pollution.
More recently, under the corporate social responsibility program WeSea (https://wesea.es/), Jealsa has developed a strategy to implement Circular Economy practices in its plants of fish processing combining energy co-generation and water and waste reuse and recycling. Under the concept of marine biorefinery, the Galician company succeeded in making the most of 100% of the fish that arrives at their facilities. Jealsa’s global value chain offers an ideal platform to understand the geopolitical implications of implementing CE practices in the food processing sector.
Description
The case will be conducted by the UVIGO team and will shed light on:
a) enablers and barriers to implement CE practices in a highly complex supply chain such as the fishing industry;
b) the emergence of self-regulated management system for circularity;
c) the implications for EU policy in the fishing and canned food industry.
One the most distinctive aspect of this case study is that canning industry needs to reutilize the most they can in order to be competitive in the market. At best, each 100 kg of fish that enters in the factory, 50 kg are initially lost (as waste) if they are not reutilize for something else. The black parts of the fish are not useless to eat by humans, the water employed during the cooking process can affect ecosystems, etc. They have a very low margin of benefits, and in order to be more competitive in markets they have been implementing by-products reutilization almost since the beginning of their activity. Thus, the circularity of the company is seen as something inherent to the canning activity, initially driven by the objective of optimizing the use of raw materials and improving competitiveness margins. In fact, when the corporate social responsibility program WeSea started, all these processes were already working, and what they do was to create a more formal structure of all these processes and improving some of the process to reach the current 100% reutilization of the fish inputs, as well as introducing the need of make packages more circular too. What the program achieved was to standardize and bring together under a single umbrella several circular economy activities that the company had been carrying out in an unstructured way for years through its different divisions.
From the external point of view, we also consider that it is important to highlight the location of the factory in Ria de Arousa, which is a common resource for the local community and for other productive sectors (especially for seafood production, fishing and tourism). Therefore, the (positive or negative) impact that the company may has in the Ria can affect local communities and other productive sectors, and hence it will be very interesting to address this common arena.
Another distinctive element regarding circularity is the origin and the destiny of the cans that they use. In Spain, there is only one organization in charge of domestic wastes of packages: ECOEMBES. It is the organization in charge of the Integrated Management System to collect packages. In summary, can producers will pay a tax (to ECOEMBES) for recycling their packages, and later ECOEMBES will collect packages to distribute them among recyclers. The controversial point is that ECOEMBES, which was constituted as a non-profit organization, is composed by the main producers of packages in Spain: BIMBO S.A., Danone S.A., TETRA PAK HISPANIA S.A., NESTLÉ ESPAÑA S.A., etc. This has been also a point of social controversy during the last decades in Spain.
Lastly, fishing sector is also a very important element of this case study since there are a lot of controversial points that could be taken into consideration: the location and the property of fisheries (and the related geopolitical conflicts), the concerns regarding the different fishing gears, the discarding of fish, etc.