Phase II : Rural Coastal Alaska Fish Waste Conversion

The Alaskan fishing industry produces over one million metric tons of by-product and waste annually. Rural coastal Alaska communities have been using the grind and dump method for decades. There is an opportunity to expand existing onshore processing in rural coastal communities and provide additional economic value from fish waste and, simultaneously, reducing or eliminating the impact of current fish waste disposal practices on the local community. There are more than 200 fish processing plants in Alaska, however, fish waste processing occurs at only ten of largest shore-based plants that extract fish meal and fish oil for use as aquaculture feed ingredients for fish and shrimp and as livestock and poultry feed ingredients. These waste processing facilities process 400 metric ton (400 MT) of waste per day, or more. The cost for these plants is several million dollars, they require a tremendous volume of fish that is only available at a small number of ports, and they are expensive to operate. In addition, the fish processing plants with waste recovery facilities focus the majority of their processing on Pollock and Cod, with only a fraction of their throughput dedicated to salmon. The majority of the smaller processing plants are dominated by the seasonal salmon processing, which makes the economics of these ventures more difficult. For years there has been a need to develop fish waste processing equipment that is significantly smaller and less expensive than current systems, opening up the opportunity for more than 100 smaller seafood processing plants to extract greater value from their product. Despite many feasibility analyses that have been conducted over the past twenty years, affordable fish waste processing equipment with a small footprint has not been introduced and demonstrated that can serve these smaller rural coastal processors because of a combination of high risk and lack of capital. Recently, the prices for the two primary salmon byproducts, meal and oil, have increased dramatically because the marketplace places a premium on human-grade salmon oil and salmon meal. The demand for Wild Alaskan Salmon meal and oil has changed the economic potential for processing salmon waste at lower volumes at the smaller scale seafood processing plants that serve rural coastal Alaska.