Found out some more info about the carcass recycling process. I talked to the guy who spearheads the volunteer effort at Voight's Creek. He said he had heard that the buyer who won the bid paid $450,000 for all the fish that are left from all the hatcheries. It is quite the process. The buyer has individual trucks that pick up the fish from the hatcheries. The fish are all iced down and the buyer supplies the ice. After picking up the fish the trucks all meet in Bellingham and then all the fish are loaded onto a trailer and taken to Aberdeen for processing.
He said all the money goes into the general fund. Too bad it doesn't go back to the hatcheries and/or volunteer groups.
He has to start working on the permit for the volunteer group to recycle the fish at Voight's Creek three months before the work starts. He wanted to have 5000 fish to recycle but the hatchery would only give them 4000 fish by permit. The hatchery puts the fish in totes but the volunteers must supply the vehicles, gas and manpower to distribute the fish. They hauled fish way up into the upper Puyallup watershed and feeder creeks. Some of the carcasses were distributed lower in the river. Tails were cut to distinguish them from naturally spawning fish. He had to get a key to get on private land.
The Puyallup tribe recycles some live fish in the river. He said he had heard they did 500 fish. He didn't know if they did dead fish also. And if so, he didn't know how many. He knew that Gary Loomis and his group of volunteers had recycled 17,000 carcasses into the rivers in SW Washington.