[edit] Rendering
"The city of Los Angeles sends 200 tons of euthanized cats and dogs to West Coast Rendering plant every month. This is just from the city's animal shelters and does not include animals from private veterinarians." -- Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.
The Dark Side of Recycling
by Keith Woods
(Note: In February 1990, the San Francisco Chronicle carried a macabre two-part story detailing how stray dogs and cats and pound animals are routinely rounded up by meat renderers and ground up into -- of all things -- pet food. According to Keith Wood, the researcher who brought the information to the Chronicle, the paper buried the story and deleted many of the charges Wood had documented. A report Wood worked on for ABC television's 20/20 was similarly watered down. In exasperation, Wood brought his story to Earth Island Journal. A warning to readers: this report is not for the squeamish.)
A Rendering Plant Somewhere in Southern California -- The rendering plant floor is piled high with "raw product". Thousands of dead dogs and cats; heads and hooves from cattle, sheep, pigs and horses; whole skunks; rats and raccoons -- all waiting to be processed. In the 90 degree heat, the piles of dead animals seem to have a life of their own as millions of maggots swarm over the carcasses.
Two bandanna-masked men begin operating Bobcat mini-dozers, loading the "raw" into a ten-foot deep stainless steel pit. They are undocumonted workers from Mexico doing a dirty job. A giant auger-grinder at the bottom of the pit begins to turn. Popping bones and squeezing flesh are sounds from a nightmare you will never forget.
Rendering is the process of cooking raw animal material to remove the moisture and fat. The rendering plant works like a giant kitchen. The cooker, or "chef", blends the raw product in order to maintain a certain ratio between the carcasses of pets, livestock, poultry waste and supermarket rejects.
Once the mass is cut into small pieces, it is transported to another auger for fine shredding. It is then cooked at 280 degrees for one hour. The continuous batch cooking process goes on non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week as meat is melted away from bones in the hot "soup". During this cooking process, the "soup" produces a fat of yellow grease or tallow that rises to the top and is skimmed off. The cooked meat and bone are sent to a hammermill press, which squeezes out the remaining moisture and pulverizes the product into a gritty powder. Shaker screens sift out excess hair and large bone chips. Once the batch is finished, all that is left is yellow grease, meat and bone meal.
A Meaty Menu
As the American Journal of Veterinary Research explains, the recycled meat and bone meal is used as "a source of protein and other nutrients in the diets of poultry and swine and in pet foods, with lesser amounts used in the feed of cattle and sheep. Animal fat is also used in animal feeds as an energy source." Every day, hundreds of rendering plants across the United States truck millions of tons of this "food enhancer" to poultry ranches, cattle feed lots, dairy and hog farms, fish feed plants and pet food manufacturers where it is mixed with other ingredients to feed the billions of animals that meat-eating humans, in turn, will eat.
Rendering plants have different specialties. The labelling designation of a particular "run" of product is defined by the predominance of a specific animal. Some product label names are: meat meal, meat by-products, poultry meal, poultry by-products, fish meal, fish oil, yellow grease, tallow, beef fat and chicken fat.
Rendering plants perform one of the most valuable functions on Earth: they recycle used animals. Without rendering, our cities would run the risk of becoming filled with diseased and rotting carcasses. Fatal viruses and bacteria would spread uncontrolled through the population.
The Dark Side
Death is the number one commodity in a business where the demand for feed ingredients far exceeds the supply of raw product. But this elaborate system of food production through waste management has evolved into a recycling nightmare. Rendering plants are unavoidably processing toxic waste.
The dead animals (the "raw") are accompanied by a whole menu of unwanted ingredients. Pesticides enter the rendering process via poisoned livestock, fish oil laced with bootleg DDT and other organo-phosphates that have accumulated in the bodies of West Coast mackerel and tuna.
Because animals are frequently shoved into the pit with flea collars still attached, organo-phosphate-containing insecticides get into the mix as well. The insecticide Dursban arrives in the form of cattle insecticide patches. Pharmaceuticals leak from antibiotics in livestock and euthanasia drugs given to pets are also included. Heavy metals accumulate from a variety of sources -- pet ID tags, surgical pins and needles.
Even plastic winds up going into the pit. Unsold supermarket meats, chicken and fish arrive in styrofoam trays and shrink wrap. No one has time for the tedious chore of unwrapping thousands of rejected meat packs. More plastic is added to the pits with the arrival of cattle ID lags, plastic insecticide patches and the green plastic bags containing pets from veterinarians.
Rendering Judgements
Skyrocketing labor costs are one of the economic factors forcing the corporate flesh peddlers to cheat. It is far too costly for plant personnel to cut of flea collars or unwrap spoiled T-bone steaks. Every week millions of packages of plastic-wrapped meat go through the rendering process and become one of the unwanted ingredients in animal feed.
The most environmentally conscious state in the nation is California, where spot checks and testing of animal feed ingredients happen at the wobbly rate of once every (* ....missing words) The supervising state agency is the Department of Agriculture's Feed and Fertilizer Division of Compliance. Their main objective is to test for truth in labelling - does the percentage of protein, phosphorous and calcium match the rendering plant's claims; do the percentages meet state requirements? However, testing for pesticides and other toxins in animal feeds is incomplete.
In California, eight field inspectors regulate a rendering industry that feeds the animals that the state's 30 million people eat. When it comes to rendering plants, however, state and federal agencies have maintained a hands-off policy, allowing the industry to become largely self-regulating. An article in the February 1990 issue of Render, the industry's national magazine, suggests that the self- regulation of certain contamination problems is not working.
One policing program that is already off to a shaky start is the Salmonella Education/Reduction Program, formed under the auspices of the Nalional Renderers Association. The magazine states that "...unless US and Canadian renderers get their heads out of the ground and demonstrate that they are serious about reducing the incidence of salmonella contamination in their animal protein meals, they are going to be faced with ... new and overly stringent government regulations."
So far the voluntary self-testing program is not working. According to the magazine, "..only about 20 percent of the total number of companies producing or blending animal protein meal have signed up for the program.. " Far fewer have done the actual testing.
The American Journal of Veterinary Research conducted an investigation into the persistence of sodium phenobarbital in the carcesses of euthanized animals at a typical rendering plant in 1985 and found "virtually no degradation of the drug occurred during this conventional rendering process ... the potential of other chemical contaminants (e.g. heavy metals, pesticides, and environmental toxicants, which may cause massive herd mortalities) to degrade during conventional rendering needs further evaluation."
Renderers are the silent partners in our food chain. But worried insiders are beginning to talk and one word that continues to come up in conversation is "pesticides." The possibility of petrochemically poisoning our food has become a reality. Government agencies and the industry itself are allowing toxins to be inadvertently recycled from the streets and supermarket shelves into the food chain. As we break into a new decade of increasingly complex pollution problems, we must rethink our place in the environment. No long hunters, we are becoming the victims of our technologicaly altered food chain.
Keith Wood is an independent television producer based in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Copyright 1990, Earth Island Journal.
Rendering: The Invisible Industry
Published 09/15/02 Source: Animal Issues, Volume 33 Number 3, Fall 2002
Ask what comes from “factory-farmed animals” and most people will think “food.” After all, eggs come from factory-farmed chickens, milk from dairy lot cows, sausages and bacon and pork chops from factory-farmed pigs. But why should we think the use of animals stops at the dinner table?
It doesn’t, of course. Leather (see “Slaughtered and Skinned”) goes into shoes, pelts become furs, and much of what is worn comes from animals. But it doesn’t stop there.
With the rendering process, every bit of farmed animals (and sometimes even our dog and cat companions) is used in an astonishing variety of items — lubricants, polish, soap, cement, ink, lipstick, pharmaceuticals, Jell-O, gummy candies, pet foods and agricultural feed, to name just a few. The rendering industry utilizes a “witch’s brew” of animal parts: spinal cords, brains, eyeballs, and intestines, turning whatever’s not wanted by the food and clothing industries into the components of a thousand useful products.
Any farmed animal has a short, pitiful life. After a life of subjugation at the hands of humans, it’s off to slaughter, to be used in the products we see all around us — in our homes, our medicine cabinets, our furniture, even in our children’s toys. Misery and pain exist behind every child’s stroke of a Crayola crayon, which, just like many of the glues and adhesives found among a kid’s art supplies, is derived from rendered animal parts. While the child takes pains to draw their favorite farm animal, it’s the real life farmed animals who endure the real pain.
100 Million Pounds a Day
In the United States, roughly 250 rendering plants located around the country process approximately 100 million pounds of “waste” or inedible parts of slaughtered animals such as bones, blood, hides, offal, feathers, as well as road kill, spoiled grocery meat, restaurant grease, and euthanized dogs, cats, and horses, every day. The end results of the process are a variety of products including tallow, lard, animal feed, protein meal, cosmetics, and mechanical lubricants. According to the industry rhetoric, rendering provides an essential service to the public by “recycling” unwanted animal remains and restaurant waste. (The renderers even call themselves the Original Recyclers in a 1996 self-published book about the industry.) Indeed, in 1994 the rendering industry processed a staggering 50 billion pounds of poultry and animal remains into commodities such as protein meals, grease, and tallow.
The National Renderer’s Association classifies the use of rendered products into four primary categories:
as an ingredient in animal (livestock and pet) rations; as ingredients in industrial processes; in the manufacture of soaps and personal care products; and as edible products for use in the food industry. While the thought of a rendering plant might conjure horrific images of plant workers accidentally falling into boiling vast of muck (boiling is known as wet rendering), those are images out of the past. Modern rendering facilities use dry rendering, which releases fat by dehydrating the raw animal materials in large, mostly enclosed, steel cookers.
Regardless of the method, the fact remains that animals are subjected to cruel and degrading treatment even after the slaughter.
Fresh “Source Material”
The rendering industry recognizes two classifications of processing plants, integrated and independent.
An integrated rendering plant is located on site and works in tandem with either a slaughterhouse or a poultry processing plant. This close proximity to the killing allows the integrated rendering plant to receive relatively fresh “source material,” a necessity as all edible-product rendering plants are subject to annual inspection by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as well as standards set by the Food Safety and Inspection Service.
The resulting human-grade, edible products are known as lard (derived from the fatty tissues of pigs) and tallow (from cows). The U.S. produces a little over 50% of the world’s tallow and grease, and exports almost 40% of this.
Edible products are rendered in a continuous two-stage centrifugal separation process. Fat trimmings from slaughterhouses are transferred to a specially designed grinder that cuts the fat into uniformly sized pieces that are sent via conveyor belt to a melt tank. At 110° F the melted fatty tissue is pumped to a “disintegrator” where the fat cells are ruptured. Next, a centrifuge separates the protein solids from the actual melted fats — the coveted commodity. Finally, these edible fats are again subjected to centrifuge where they become “polished” using 200° F steam.
The resulting polished edible tallow or lard — which looks just like the lard or tallow sold in grocery stores for use in cooking — is pumped to storage and later sold to a wholesaler for eventual sale to the public.
On the Outskirts
In contrast, independent rendering plants, which are often located on the outskirts of urban areas, process a wide variety of animal remains, from rotten grocery meat to deceased zoo animals. In states where it is not prohibited, these plants also process euthanized dogs and cats from animal shelters and veterinarian offices.
End products from independent rendering plants include non-human-grade tallow to be used in animal feed, and grease used for soaps, lubricants, and detergents. Also produced are feather meal and blood meal, both used in the production of livestock feed.
Although the rendering industry has been referred to as the “invisible industry,” one cannot mistake the odor that pervades the vicinity of a rendering plant. The outside of a rendering plant might look like so many other industrial enterprises, but its indescribable stink is retching. The rancid source materials, processed at temperatures of 220° F, cause these noxious smells. Recognizing the awful stench that is emitted, the rendering industry itself suggests that, since there is such high odor intensity, the emissions “should normally be treated by odor control equipment.” (Due to the “freshness” of their source materials, integrated rendering plants reportedly give off almost no noticeable odor.)
The independent renderer can be viewed as the garbage collector of the rendering business — taking everything nobody else can use. The range of different source material is therefore huge.
Typically, independent rendering plants send out their own trucks to pick up source material. Specially designed trucks collect discarded fat and bone trimmings, meat scraps, restaurant grease, blood, feathers, and offal from butcher shops, supermarkets, restaurants, fast-food chains, poultry processors, slaughterhouses, farms, feedlots, and ranches. Another truck may be dispatched to city animal shelters to collect euthanized or otherwise dead animals.
This “service” performed by the rendering industry keeps the independent render in business while relieving other businesses of unwanted products. And a small percentage of “material” comes to the plant from private individuals who may wish to dispose of a large dead animal, such as a horse. Rendering plants vary in their willingness to accept outside donations and some plants even charge a fee to the depositor. Nevertheless, the bulk of the animal product comes from slaughterhouses and/or integrated rendering plants that have already taken what they need.
Leftover Parts
The bulk of the material to be rendered consists of the leftover parts of a slaughtered animal. Because of the way the edible meats are cut from the carcass, the bones remain largely attached to one another.
The first step in the rendering process is to cut these large bodies into smaller, more manageable sizes. This raw material is “screw conveyed” — dropped onto a huge screw whose sharp edges cuts the chunks into smaller pieces — to a crusher that reduces the size to 1- or 2-inch pieces. A batch cooker cooks the pieces for 2 to 3 hours at 250-275°. These cooked materials are then put onto a sieve, known as a drain pan, where all excess fat and liquid is drained off, leaving only the solids.
The solids, now known as tankage, are conveyed to the screw press to finish the fat separation process. At this stage, the solids/tankage is known as cracklings, which gets crushed into small enough bits to filter through a 12 mesh screen, eventually becoming the “protein meal” used in livestock feed or pet food.
The independent rendering plants produce the bulk of ingredients that end up in so many different products. (See “Disheartening Specifics” for details.)
What You Can Do
Products that contain rendered ingredients are so pervasive in our society that getting along without them is a serious challenge to all but the hardiest animal rights advocate. But all of us can help reduce animal suffering by reducing our use of those products.
The good news is that cruelty-free options are available, including gummy candies, crayons (vegan-sourced crayons are not hard to find), and cosmetics.
The international symbol for cruelty-free products — the leaping bunny logo — denotes products which are free of animal sources, and includes those whose non-cruelty-free counterparts contain rendered ingredients. Visit the Leaping Bunny website to learn more.
You can find cruelty-free alternatives at your local natural foods co-op, on the Internet (use a search engine such as Google or Yahoo for “cruelty free”), or contact API for information.
Disheartening Specifics
Material from rendering plants ends up in, among other products, Jell-O, gummy candies, photographic film, fertilizer for “organic” produce, and anti-rejection drugs. The following list is by no means definitive.
Non-edible tallow is an important ingredient in wax paper, crayons, margarine, and soap; oleic acid (used in foods, soft soaps, bar soaps, permanent wave solutions, shampoos, hair dyes, creams, nail polish, lipsticks, liquid makeups, nasal sprays, inhalers); glycerine (used in inks, glues, solvents, explosives, antifreeze, cosmetics, foods, mouthwashes, toothpastes, soaps, ointments, medicines, lubricants, transmission and brake fluids, plastics); stearic acid (used in rubber and tires, cosmetics, soaps, lubricants, candles, hairsprays, conditioners, deodorants, creams, food flavoring, pharmaceutical products); and linoleic acid (used in paints and esters).
Meat meal and bone meal is used in livestock feed, poultry feed, and pet food.
API on Rendering and Pet Food
Although the most predominant ingredient in commercial pet foods is grain, API’s own investigative report, “What's Really in Pet Food,” first published in 1997, reveals:
“Meat and poultry meals, by-product meals, and meat-and-bone meal are common ingredients in pet foods. The term ‘meal’ means that these materials are not used fresh, but have been rendered.”
Using rendered ingredients allows a pet food company to sell a 40-lb. bag of generic dog food for $9.95. Otherwise, the cost of purchasing quality ingredients would be much higher than the selling price.
The rendering process supposedly destroys the bacteria from contaminated meats that go to rendering plants, as well as 4-D meats (diseased, dead, dying, or downed [disabled]) that slaughterhouses cannot process for human consumption.
From our report:
“While the cooking process may kill bacteria, it does not eliminate the endotoxins some bacteria produce during their growth and are released when they die. These toxins can cause sickness and disease. Pet food manufacturers do not test their products for endotoxins.”
Dead animals contribute more than bacteria. Newspapers occasionally feature lurid tales of cats, dogs, or even zoo animals poisoned by the phenobarbital that stayed in the rendered tissue of a euthanized animal and was present in the food given them. Industry insiders admit that rendered pets and roadkill were used in pet food some years ago. Although there are still no laws or regulations against it, the practice is uncommon today, and pet food companies universally deny that their products contain any such materials. However, so-called “4D” animals (dead, dying, diseased, disabled) were only recently banned for human consumption and are still legitimate ingredients for pet food.
[edit] See Also
[edit] Relevant Movies & Videos
- Soylent Green (1973) -- In this movie, human remains are turned into human food, bearing a striking resemblance to the very real rendering industry that puts euthanized pets, road kill, and anything left from slaughtered animals that is deemed not fit for human consumption into human food, toothpaste and chewing gum.
- Inside a Rendering Facility
[edit] External Links
- Killing Our Pets With Every Meal by Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.
- Haarslev PB30/60 crusher in action
- Dirty Jobs -- Animal Rendering
- What Happens To Unwanted Dogs & Cats
[edit] Rendering Associations and Magazines
Find out more from the rendering industry itself:
- National Renderers Association (NRA)
- 801 N. Fairfax Street, Suite 205, Alexandria, VA 22314
- (703) 683-0155 • Fax (703) 683-2626
- Tom Cook, President
- E-mail: tcook@nationalrenderers.com
- Web address: www.renderers.org
- Render Magazine -- "A non-profit activity in association with the National Renderers Association in the interest of informing the rendering and its affiliated industries on management, operations, research and development, product markets, environmental control, quality assurance, and legislative issues within all facets of the rendering industry."