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Smoked Salmon Case Study

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Almost every consumer product produces some type of economic, environmental or social footprint. Smoked salmon is no exception, but the specific footprints may be different depending on which company the salmon is purchased from. The two companies in question for this example are Spence & Co. Tradition Scottish-Style and Echo Falls Pacific wild. Both of these companies have their own unique ways of getting the smoked salmon from farm to fork. Spence & Co. and Echo Falls both follow the basic stages of producing smoke salmon. These steps are: farming, transportation from farm to processing plant, transportation to the company plant, preparing fish for retail, packaging, and distribution to food centers. Each of these stages could have any …show more content…

The processing facility has the economic costs of operating the facility, which includes electricity and labor, water, and cleaning chemicals. These costs impact the cost of the salmon when it reaches the consumers. Also there is a great environmental impact from the processing stage. Not only is there carbon being emitted by fuel being used to run the facilities, but also there is pollution from the process of cleaning the fish. The main pollutant is wastewater that is the result of cleaning the fish with water and chemicals. Most of this wastewater cannot be recycled or returned to its natural state because of the concoction of chemicals that resides in it. This water is no longer useable so the process of cleaning salmon not only has a carbon footprint, but also a negative water footprint because of taking water out of the hydrologic cycle. Another product of the processing stage is fish waste such as discarded parts of the salmon that are not desirable. This fish waste can have a social impact on whether people should by certain fish products or not. This is due to the fact that sometimes fish selling companies and farms sometimes use this fish waste to feed the fish they are raising. People may not realise that they are eating fish that were not raised naturally or

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