If you are new to the topic of animal rendering, you may not realize how crucial it is for environmental sustainability worldwide – in addition to saving landfill space and accounting for $10 billion in annual economic activity across the country, including rural America.
As a process to reclaim and reuse animal agriculture resources responsibly, reduce food waste, and find important uses for meat by-products, rendering is recycling at its most basic. In fact, you may be surprised to know that you probably use rendered products in your daily life – in paints, candles, plastics, and many other household items.
So, if rendering is so vital to everyday life, you might wonder what would a world without animal rendering look like? In order to do that, we’ll need to compare what benefits rendering offers us:
With rendering:
- We effectively address the effects of food waste by recycling 99% of unwanted meat.
- We divert billions of pounds of food waste from landfills every year.
- We reclaim and return billions of gallons of clean water to rivers and streams.
- We can lower greenhouse gas emissions (with rendering, 5 times more GHGs are sequestered than produced).
- We can produce renewable biodiesel which creates 80 percent lower carbon emissions than petroleum diesel.
Without rendering:
- We would waste roughly 50% of each meat animal.
- We would fill all U.S. landfills in four years.
- We would waste water by not cleaning it and returning it to waterways, and we would contaminate water if animal leftovers if we sent animal leftovers to a landfill.
- We would lose the environmental benefits of lower greenhouse gas emissions.
- We would experience increased carbon emissions from less environmentally friendly fuels.
Essentially, a world without rendering would turn a sustainable, circular economy system into a massive environmental hazard, overloading landfills and decreasing resource efficiency. For more rendering facts, tap or click here.
