The sun glinting off its surface, the water lapping at its banks, the way it winds through a cityscape or the countryside. Wherever you live, there’s a river nearby to enjoy this June.
That’s because it’s National Rivers Month, an annual celebration dedicated to appreciating, protecting, and restoring the thousands of rivers and streams across the United States.
“But what does this have to do with rendering?” you might wonder. The answer is, “A lot!”
Indeed, if it were not for rendering, we would:
- Waste billions of gallons of water that can instead be reclaimed, treated, and safely returned to the environment through the rendering process.
- Miss an important opportunity to protect municipal sewer and wastewater systems by recycling used cooking oil instead of allowing it to be poured down drains.
Instead, rendering reclaims and returns billions of gallons of clean water to rivers and streams. In fact, roughly four billion gallons of water are reclaimed during the rendering process – and that water meets federal, state, and local standards before being safely returned to rivers and streams.
But rendering helps water in more ways than only output — renderer pickup of used cooking grease and oil, saves municipal sewer and wastewater systems from becoming clogged, contaminated, and causing millions of dollars in damage. Through renderer-restaurant partnerships, 4.4 billion pounds of used cooking oil are collected within the US and Canada each year and, with the help of oil rendering, are recycled into sustainable products like biodiesel and renewable diesel!
In addition to its positive impact on our waterways, rendering is beneficial to other aspects of our environment:
- 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.
- Rendering also stops greenhouse gasses from being released into the environment, which is what would happen if that meat material be allowed to decompose in a landfill. By diverting this material from landfills, rendering sustainably reduces food waste that can be up-cycled into new products like nutritious pet food.
So, the next time you pass a river, think about how the rendering industry is working hard to ensure clean, safe water and a greener environment overall.
