Canadian slaughter facilities produce a mountain of animal waste each year but finding a use for the material has become increasingly difficult since the May announcement of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in an Alberta cow.
If Canada bans all use of meat and bone meal in animal feeds, the dilemma will become worse, said an analyst.
“The livestock complex (including producers, packers, renderers, meat distributors and retailers) would have to absorb a $1.5 billion increase in costs due to lost revenue and increased disposal expenses,” said Mark Jekanowski of the Sparks Companies, an American economic analysis firm.
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In Canada, 2.6 million tonnes of slaughterhouse waste materials, deadstock, restaurant grease, fat, bone and fish materials are sent to rendering facilities each year.
In the United States, the supply is much larger. About 18 million tonnes of raw material are rendered into eight million tonnes of marketable products, including four million tonnes of protein feed ingredients such as meat and bone meal and three million tonnes of fat-based feed additives and industrial chemicals.
For each animal slaughtered, 28 percent is turned into meat and bone meal and nine percent into blood meal and related products.
“A hundred years before recycling became popular the rendering industry was in the business of turning waste into money,” Jekanowski said.
There are a number of ways legislators could choose to handle a ban.
Europe has chosen the latter and burns its slaughter waste in incineration plants. The high temperature incineration needed to destroy prions that cause BSE costs 40 percent more than placing slaughter waste into landfills.
Landfill costs average about $250 per tonne in the U.S. while trucking adds another $20.
Incineration costs about $325 per tonne, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
“There are environmental concerns about the disposal of large quantities of raw animal products into landfills. There is seepage of fluids from decomposition into groundwater supplies and, if prions are an issue, then more science is needed to find out what happens to them in a landfill scenario,” said Jekanowski.
Ruminants eat 70 percent of the blood meal available in the U.S. If it were banned, Jekanowski estimates it would cost the U.S. livestock complex $143 million annually in disposal and feed market losses.
A ban of all uses of ruminant material in feed given to any animal would cost $910 million.
A ban on the feeding of any livestock slaughter waste and deadstock renderings to any livestock would cost $2.17 billion annually.
“That is based on placing the material in landfills. You would still need to pay to render the raw waste to reduce the volume of material and stabilize it prior to landfilling,” Jekanowski said.
