Maryland crab shell team wins top engineering award
Baltimore, MD- For cracking open markets for crab shell waste--tons and tons of it from Maryland's crabmeat industry--a research/business team will receive the Outstanding Engineering Achievement of the year award by the Engineering Society of Baltimore (ESB) on February 20.
Their project began in 1995 with a challenge to University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI) student to create new compounds from shells left after eating a dozen steamed blue crabs. Now, for teaming up on a large-scale project to process shells, a potential Chesapeake Bay pollutant, the team of UMBI scientists and engineers, state officials and entrepreneurs, will receive the top ESB award. The Society is a consortium of 20 mid-Atlantic engineering societies.
At center stage of the project is a new crab shell processing plant, Chitin Work's America Inc. in Cambridge, Md. It is a direct result of research at UMBI's Center for Agricultural Biotechnology (CAB) and coordination by the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED). According to Pat Condon, the company general manager, the plant successfully completed its first year of processing tons of nutrient-rich crab waste this past summer and fall.
"This project is converting a potentially polluting waste into a marketable product," says Gregory Payne, CAB professor, who leads research to design new forms of the compound chitosan from crab shells. Already sold in products from cosmetics to dietary supplements, chitosan is made from chitin, the structural polymer in crustaceans, insects and some fungi.
CAB researchers are changing the basic chemistry of chitosan in order to create products such as water-resistant adhesives, lubricants for oil drilling, and thickeners for cosmetics and other consumer products. Louisiana-based Venture Innovations, Inc., an oil and gas firm is purchasing the new chitosan from Chitin Works.
In Maryland, growing concerns by state agencies and citizen groups in the 1990's led to strict laws to prevent excess nutrients from adversely affecting the Chesapeake Bay. But the crabmeat-packing industry of Maryland's Eastern Shore generates 5,000 tons/year of nutrient-rich wastes. Land filling the waste, at about $35-40/ton, could damage the industry, whose revenues have been declining in recent years, according to DBED.
Dan Healey, director of investment financing with the DBED, initiated the university-industry partnership to process crab waste when he identified Venture. He discovered that 25-year old specialty chemical company produced derivatives of various natural polymers for niche markets - mostly in oil drilling applications. Because Venture had a long-standing interest in extending their processing technologies from cellulose to chitosan, Healey introduced Jack Cowan, the company president, to Pat Condon of Chitin Works.
Condon and Cowan teamed-up with Payne's laboratory where undergraduate student Joseph Lenhart immediately accepted a challenge by Condon. He asked the student to see how quickly he could make chitosan from a dozen crabs. Within weeks, Lenhart and Payne had developed procedures and generated gram-quantities of chitosan. In 1996, the Condon-Payne team was awarded state grants from the Maryland Industrial Partnership (MIPS) program to develop a crab chum-to-chitosan process and to perform a preliminary economic analysis. They scaled up the project to the pilot size in the University of Maryland's Bioprocess Scale-Up Facility at College Park. In late 1999, ChitinWorks began accepting wastes from local crab-packers.
Because there are nearly limitless changes that biochemists could make in a polymer as large as chitosan, says Payne, there are many potentially new products from crab shells. The key technical requirement is to learn how to controllably derivatize chitosan, he says, or to "tailor" its functional properties. Cowan and Payne have mapped a strategic plan for on-going research.
The public is invited to the ESB reception on February 20, according to Randi Dutch, executive director, 410-539-6914 or click on: www.esb.org. The address is: Engineering Society of Baltimore, Garrett-Jacobs Mansion, 11 West Mount Vernon Place, Baltimore, Maryland 21201.
