[L’industrie c’est fou] Scale wants to decorate your interior with fish scales

After construction helmets made of scallop shells and stools made of oyster shells, the French start-up Scale has decided to tackle the recovery of another major waste product from the sea: fish scales. Dubbed ‘Scalite’, the material she designed looks like stone and is sold in blocks 550mm long and 12mm wide, and available in seven different colours. La Scalite, thought of as a decorative product, “mainly interests interior designers, but also manufacturers looking for sustainable materials and some large luxury groups“, according to Erik de Laurens, who co-founded the company in Hasparren (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) in 2018.

But how to transform scales into a solid, functional material, while avoiding the smell of rotten fish? By extracting the organic component of the scale, essentially made up of collagen, a biopolymer, and mixing it with the mineral part of the raw material to bind it. The result is a powder which, when compressed, forms Scalite plates. Simple in appearance, this method required several years of research and development, especially since no resin, plastic or chemical glue was added to the composition of the Scalite, so that it is entirely recyclable and biodegradable.

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Develop local recovery channels

Although the marketing of the product was launched in 2022, Scale still has to meet a major challenge to improve the carbon footprint of Scalite: set up a French and European industry for harvesting and processing sea co-products capable of absorbing large volumes of scales (it takes 60 kilos to make a block of one square meter of Scalite). Currently, “[elles] come from Asia, and are cleaned with water and dried in the sunon the spot, explains Erik de Laurens, who deplores the fact that it is difficult to mobilize the actors in France. “For me, the obstacle is above all cultural. These are people who work a lot and who do not necessarily have the time and energy to tackle this“. But the entrepreneur does not despair. “This is changing because the largest groups, in particular, are positioning themselves on their CSR commitments“, he remarks.

While waiting to be able to source French scales, Scale is actively seeking funding and is already working on the development of new materials potentially intended for other markets, for the moment kept secret. “The workshop is running fast“, enthuses the leader, convinced of the potential of his technology.

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