87% SALES 13% 



PROFITS 



' \ 



$tf ® 



Figure 1. — As a result of chemical research on tallow, one of the largest United States 

 meat processing plants derives most of its profits (78$) from the sale of chemical 

 byproducts, although these amount to only 13$ of total sales. 



developed new raw materials for soap and 

 paint manufacture (displacing fish oils) 

 might well develop new profitable uses 

 for fish oils. The example of what re- 

 cent chemical research has done for the 

 meat byproducts field should be noted. 

 Research was started 20 years ago by the 

 U. S. Department of Agriculture to de- 

 velop new uses for tallow and other fat 

 waste products of the meat industry. As 

 a result of this work and parallel re- 

 search by the meat industry itself, the 

 entire profit pattern in the meat industry 

 within the past several years has changed. 

 Figure 1 shows the current situation in 

 one of the two largest American meat 

 packing concerns. Although sales of meat 

 itself account for 87 percent of the 

 total sales, the small 13 percent sales 

 corresponding to byproducts — mostly 

 chemical derivatives from tallow — make 

 up 78 percent of profits with only 22 

 percent coming from the sale of the 

 meats I 



Just think for a moment what this 

 might mean for the tuna industry if a 

 similar situation could be achieved. Even 

 if price from the sale of canned tuna were 

 to only equal costs, profits from the sale 

 of chemical byproducts would be sufficient 

 to make the operation attractive. In ef- 

 fect you would be handling tuna primarily 



for the chance to get the oil as the lu- 

 crative raw material from which most of 

 the profits could be derived. 



It is from some of these considera- 

 tions that the Bureau has made its decision 

 to embark on an extensive research program 

 on fish oils. 



Since fish oils are not simple chemical 

 compounds but rather mixtures of a large 

 number of chemical substances, the first 

 step in this program has been to separate 

 the numerous compounds present in order to 

 identify what is present and determine 

 which cnes represented important materials 

 having unique properties that would possess 

 potential industrial value. It is known 

 that the fatty acids making up fish oils 

 in part differ from those in animal and 

 vegetable oils in several ways including 

 possession of higher degrees of unsatura- 

 tion. Such compounds, however, are mixed 

 in the fish oils with the more usual fatty 

 acids such as occur in animal and vegetable 

 oils. The first task, therefore, which our 

 chemists had to undertake was to devise 

 means to sort out and separate these various 

 components of the fish oil. At the Seattle 

 laboratory such a separation is carried out 

 with a special still consisting of a "spin- 

 ning band column" which effectively frac- 

 tionates the components. This is only one 



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