Changing fish waste into cosmetics

In a video conference with Cobden Primary School, Dr Vicky Webb of NIWA explains the process of changing fish waste into cosmetics.

Transcript

David Copeland: Has anybody got any other questions?

Cobden School: How do you change the fish wastage into cosmetics?

Dr Vicky Webb (NIWA): Say for example, the liver of the ghost shark, it is one of the fish we sometimes get. Say that is very rich in a type of chemical that is very good for stopping wrinkles. What we do then is when the fisherman go out and they catch these, we say “Please save the liver”. Basically we freeze it, freeze dry it. It comes out like surprised peas when they are all dried. So you take those and then they have a big machine that grinds it up to a powder because its all dry, it goes into a powder and then they mix it up with special chemicals like alcohols or acetone or methylated spirits or those sorts of things. They take the chemical that we want out of it and then we take that and we dry it down. So we get a little powder at the end and then that powder gets taken along and put into a face cream.