4. Discussion
The future of aquaculture is to produce fish in a more sustainable way, because demand is likely to increase (FAO, 2010) and policy frameworks are becoming more restrictive environmentally.
However, RAS technology should secure the control of water quality parameters and the optimization of rearing conditions at the lowest environmental cost. Despite that, the benefits of RAS will depend upon the type and where they are set up. A full control of (I) water quality parameters and (II) water treatment units’ performance, to achieve biosecurity levels and reduce environmental impacts, should represent the main benefit of RAS. Nevertheless, their adoption in the future will be determined by the response of industry to the challenges that they face. In the first instance, research and improvements, in terms of individual devices, should be directed towards commercial scale aquaculture, obtaining more reliable and useful data. Their operational systems will need to be better understood, in order to move towards a standardization of the industry. Moreover, in terms of improving their management and having more efficient and less failure prone systems, more specialized and highly capable people will need to be trained. By now, more than 50% of the companies surveyed have been rebuilt or
redesigned due to RAS system’s failure. As stated within this contribution, many are the factors and interactions, from the designing stage through the product quality, which can affect both the production success and the subsequent economic profitability of the selected business concept using RAS technologies (Fig. 8).