for manufacturing purposes would be that of assenblinc; and transporting 

 the raw material, i-iany Alaskan salmon canr-ieries are located at small 

 isolated communities. In a few areas several c-inneries are located close 

 together but this is not the rule. Therefore it would be necessary to 

 collect and transport the raw mate:a.?l over a considerable distance un- 

 less it proved to be sufficiently econoiical or profitable to process 

 the raw product at each individual source of waste. The salmon canning 

 season in the various areas of Alaska are comparatively short, ranging 

 from less than four weeks in the Bristol Bay area to approximately six 

 weeks in Southeastern Alaska. To further complicate the picture, even 

 though the season might be of four weeks' duration, most of the pack 

 might be produced in a ten day interval. Thus it would be necessary to 

 handle and at least start the initial processing of tremendous quantities 

 of salmon cannery waste during a period of ten days. At many of the cannery 

 locations, fresh water is quite limited and often is not adequate for 

 sustained cannery operations at peak cap.icity. Because of the precipi- 

 tous nature of the terrain at many cannery sites, very little area would 

 be available for additional buildings except at prohibitive cost and any 

 chemical operation that might increase the fire hazard adjacent to the 

 cc.nnery would probably not be considered in any case. The nature of the 

 salmon waste itself might offer additional problons. For example, in con- 

 sidering protein recovery from saLnon cannery waste, the presence of 

 various tissues and organs would undoubtedly complicate the problem of pre- 

 paring a semi-Durified homo.'^eneous, uniform product. Salmon cannery 

 tri-jiiings also contain a considerable amount of oil which oxidizes so eas- 

 ily that fat removal would prob bly be required in order to produce a high 

 quality protein suitable for subsequent pharmaceutical or chemical appli- 

 cation. 



Possibility of Preparing Proteins from Salmon Cannery Waste 



i-iany of the problems described in the preceding paragraph are peculiar 

 to Alaska and perhaps can be re-solved or overcome by further study or by 

 changing conditions in the future. The difficulties which might be en- 

 countered in processing the cannery trimmings with regard to protein re- 

 covery are more applicable to the head, collar and tail sections than to 

 some of the other parts or organs. For exsjiiple, salmon eg^^s or salmon 

 milt could easily be separated from the remaining waste material. Since 

 all of the nutritional elements are present in the salmon egg for re- 

 production of the fish, the egg protein should be of excellent quality. 

 In preparing this protein, which amounts to about 25 percent of the total 

 weight of the salmon roe, it would be advantageous also to recover at 

 the same time the oil and lipide constituents. An operation designed to 

 prepare a fat-free semi-purified protein and simultaneously to recover 

 the valuable fat fractions of salmon eggs seems to offer good economic 

 pos abilities. Salmon :iiilt, likewise, could be separated readily from the 

 salmon cannery waste, .lilt contains a simple protein, protamine, which 

 is used to prepare protamine insulin, a valuable modified insulin for 

 treatment of diabetes. The present market for protamine is comparatively 

 small, but should additional uses be discovered for protamine, its pro- 

 duction on a much larger scale would be relatively sim.ple. This protein 

 is exceedingly rich in the imino acid arginine and should its use be 



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