Darling is and always has been dedicated to following a philosophy of sustainability, by recycling virtually all of the waste materials we collect into usable products in an environmentally safe manner. We’ve been providing this service for over 125 years.
Many of our customers have asked us, “What can you do to make me ‘green’?”
We like to tell them they already are! Darling isn’t hurriedly adding new services to help our customers be green – it’s what we’ve always done and always been; and by partnering with us, so have our customers.
Take our rendering business as an example. America likes its meat. For every pound of red meat that is consumed, there is a corresponding pound of inedible meat byproduct that must be disposed of. Over 60 billion pounds of these inedible byproducts are generated by the US food industry annually, of which the rendering industry processes 52 billion. Without recycling, some processors would turn to incineration or landfills. Dumping 50 billion pounds of these byproducts would reduce the country’s available landfill space by 25% a year, taking up all available space in only four years, and leaving traditional landfill materials without a disposal site. Additionally, land filling animal byproducts contributes to the production of methane gas and odors, and attracts rodents and bacteria, making such use of landfills a potential health and environmental hazard.
Other alternatives to rendering are just as undesirable and inefficient. Composting this amount of waste material also requires a tremendous amount of space, and spreading composted animal byproducts on grazing land could spread deadly pathogens which would otherwise be killed off during the rendering process. Burial and incineration are other alternatives, but they also can harm the environment and are restricted from use in some states.
Rendering is the most cost-efficient, environmentally desirable and bio-secure solution to this disposal problem, and yields commercially usable products as its result – and we’ve been doing it for 125 years, hand-in-hand with our customers.