Articles

By Stanley Kaye

The rendering of protein – taking all chicken parts that are not required to be eaten and rendering them into a valuable product – appears to hide in the shadow of the poultry industry, but recent evidence indicates that it deserves greater attention.

Wikipedia defines rendering as the process that converts waste animal tissue into stable, usable materials. According to the popular online encyclopedia, rendering can refer to any processing of animal products into more useful materials, or, more narrowly, to the rendering of whole animal fatty tissue into purified fats such as lard or tallow.

The poultry industry has become accustomed to treating rendering in the way one treats waste bins, essential but smelly and not something to pay much attention to, but this is not necessarily the case.

Nancy Foster, president of the National Renderers Association and Fats and Proteins Research Foundation said at a Convention in Atlanta, that the North American rendering industry generated more than $10 billion in annual economic activity.

She added that the rendering business was the original green sustainable part of the industry. The renders were green before it “was cool to be green,” Foster concluded.

The rendering industry greatly assists in the reduction of food waste, returns water to the environment, upcycles animal leftovers into safe ingredients for hundreds of products, and increases the environmental sustainability of animal agriculture. 

As I previously noted in my article “How the poultry industry can fight global warming while improving its bottom line,” the claim that the poultry industry wastes a large part of the grain that goes into making poultry meat is untrue. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be left in a form that it is of no use to anybody and may even be harmful (e.g., plastic waste in a landfill). The rendering process is the tool that returns the byproducts of the poultry plant to useful materials that are of economic and environmental benefit.

While setting up a poultry project, a rendering plant, together with a water purity plant, should be an essential part. For example, in Georgia Agrotop recently built for the Chirina company a state-of-the art rendering plant with two product lines that converts feathers and all other slaughterhouse waste into valuable protein.

This is an excellent example of how Agrotop brings expert knowledge to design the system that fits the project’s needs.

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The writer is a poultry consultant for Agrotop. He has 30 years hands-on experience in poultry farming. He has an economics degree from Leeds University and an MBA from Heriot Watt University – Scotland.

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The writer is the Business Development Manager at Agrotop, a leading international supplier of integrated livestock projects.