Seafood Watch, a Monterey Bay Aquarium program that promotes consumer awareness in the seafood industry, announced today that it will now recommend seafood carrying the mark of other well-known sustainability programs.
According to a statement from the aquarium, the program will now list on its “buy” list certain seafood species that bear the stamp of approval from the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), NaturLand, Canada Organic, and Friend of the Sea. All of the organizations assess seafood producers and processors, granting certification to all that meet their standards of sustainability.
The organizations’ certification programs will augment the work Seafood Watch already does to assess seafood producers.
“We wanted to help our business partners, and to eliminate redundancies so we’re not duplicating research into fisheries and fish-farming operations that have already been assessed under robust eco-certification programs,” said Dr. Tom Pickerell, senior science manager for Seafood Watch. “It’s our hope that the findings from our benchmarking work will also be used by standard setters and eco-certification programs that didn’t earn a ‘buy’ recommendation this time around to improve their standards so we can defer to them in the future.”
Marine Harvest agrees to tougher ASC limits
One of the world's largest fish farm companies, Marine Harvest, has voluntarily agreed to much tougher limits on its pesticides use and seal killing by joining a strict new environment scheme.
Marine Harvest will join the Aquaculture Stewardship council, a new accreditation scheme championed by WWF, after coming under repeated attack for heavy use of toxic chemicals, seal-killing and major outbreaks of sea lice and salmon diseases.
The Norwegian-owned company, which grows 25 percent of all Scotland's farmed salmon, has promised to put all its UK fish farms through ASC accreditation by the end of this decade in what supporters of the scheme believes could transform the environmental sustainability of salmon farming.