These days, you can’t open a newspaper or turn on the TV without seeing a story about the environment and sustainability – and the practice of rendering can provide solutions to benefit both.
What is rendering?
Rendering is a process to reclaim and reuse animal agriculture resources responsibly, reduce food waste, and find important uses for meat by-products. It takes leftover materials from animal processing, such as fat, bones, and other materials, and reuses them for new applications instead of discarding them and contributing to waste. This process has been practiced for thousands of years, so you could say that rendering is the “original recycling.”
What products can be made from rendering?
Safe and nutritious Animal feed, pet food, renewable biofuels, industrial products, and even things like tires and fireworks can all be produced from rendering.
What are the environmental impacts of rendering?
Rendering is one of the most sustainable practices in the world and can help to improve our environment in a number of ways:
- It reduces food waste: Roughly 50% of an animal is considered inedible by Americans. Rendering reclaims these tissues and transforms them into ingredients for countless products — effectively addressing the effects of food waste by recycling 99% of this unwanted meat and diverting it from landfills.
- It aids in water recovery: Billions of gallons of water are reclaimed during the rendering process. That water meets federal, state, and local standards when returned to rivers and streams. In addition, renderer pickup of used cooking grease and oil saves municipal sewer and wastewater systems from becoming clogged, causing millions of dollars in damage, repairs and compromising water quality.
- It creates green energy: Rendering turns animal byproducts into valuable feed stocks for low-carbon fuels like biodiesel, renewable diesel, and sustainable aviation fuel. These fuels play an important role in cutting greenhouse gas emissions – as well as providing a sustainable, domestic energy source that supports rural economies.
- It reduces landfill waste: By rendering the leftover material from the food we eat, like meat and bone scraps, we stop it from going to the landfill, which saves huge volumes of landfill space. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, food waste takes up more space in landfills than any other material. Keeping meat leftovers out of landfills also reduces greenhouse gasses from being released into the environment.
- Saving cropland: Using rendered products means needing less land to produce crops, saving water required to irrigate the crops, and reducing labor needed to tend the crops. And of course, by upcycling a product like rendered animal leftovers (that would otherwise be thrown away), the act of using rendered materials in lieu of crop grown ingredients reduces food waste.
Recently, the EPA added rendering back to the Wasted Food Scale. This reinforces these messages: that rendering’s sustainability benefits are so well-established that they deserve clear recognition at the federal level. Seeing rendering once again reflected in EPA’s framework is further proof of rendering’s important role in reducing food waster and overall sustainability. You can review the updated Wasted Food Scale here.
