EU: Biodiesel solution for animal by-products

[Bdog]

http://www.just-food.com/news_detail.asp?art=57884

A specialist committee of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has declared that manufacturing biodiesel is a safe way of disposing of so-called category 1 animal by-products, that could spread BSE or CJD.

EFSA’s panel on biological hazards has concluded that because the material at the start of the production process is rendered and treated at 133Celsius for 20 minutes, “it may be concluded that the resulting biodiesel (and by-products) do not carry a TSE risk.”

[NNadir]

1. In the June 2004 issue of National Geographic, there is a picture of a cow

and the fine young woman who raised it, the woman having won a prize for her efforts bringing up the cow. Beside her is the a stack of barrels of oil that went into raising the cow. ("The End of Cheap Oil," National Geographic June 2004, the picture of the girl, the cow, and the six barrels of oil is on pages 98-99.) It is immediately evident that the mass of oil consumed in raising the cow is pretty much equal to the mass of the cow itself. Thus, it is doubtful, given that much of the cow will end up on backyard grills and in Big Macs and Whoppers, that making biodiesel out of cows is a rather expensive way of making fuel and certainly is a net energy loser.

The United States consumes 155,000,000 barrels of oil each year to grow cattle. http://www.harpers.org/Oil.html This means that 2% of our total oil consumption (7.1 billion barrels in 2002) goes to raising cattle. I'm quite sure that the situation is not appreciably different in Europe. It's very nice that you can recover a small fraction of the energy cost of a cow by making some of the destructive and noxious waste of the whole wasteful enterprise into biodiesel, but as an energy solution, this has all the dubious features of other perpetual motion machines: It sounds good to the credulous, but it's otherwise useless.

I think a better way to avoid the spread of BSE or CJD would simply be not raising the cow, killing it and eating it in the first place.

[midnight armadillo]

3. Or not raise the cow with oil

I think a better way to avoid the spread of BSE or CJD would simply be not raising the cow, killing it and eating it in the first place.

Cattle have been raised for thousands of years without oil. They need plenty of room to graze, which is available if we stop growing corn on it to feed to the cows (which eliminates herbicides/pesticides and the fuel to harvest and transport it). Natural prairie provides plenty of forage for cows. Decentralizing slaughterhouses would eliminate much of the transport costs for slaughter. The cows would also then not need to consume massive amounts of (other) animal protein to properly digest the corn since they evolved to eat grass. The lack of intensive feed lots means the cows don't get so sick and don't need massive shots of human antibiotics.

There are many side effects - one is that the meat needs to be aged to be tender, meaning it gets pricier. Another is that the environment is vastly improved, and farmers earn money by renting out natural land. Plus the meat is then naturally high in Omega-3 fatty acids rather than Omega-6 and is healthier. Pricier meat==less red meat consumption, which is overall a healthy thing in the US.

If you then take the animal waste from slaughter in such a scenario and turn it into biodiesel instead of feeding it to other animals (like we do now) then there could be a net supply of biodiesel since the energy inputs into raising the cattle would be so low.

[NNadir]

4. The economics would also be very different, now wouldn't they?

People engage in factory farming for a reason: It's cheaper.

I agree that raising cattle would be environmentally more sustainable if cattle were raised on grasslands. They would also contain less fat (and therefore less tallow and therefore less biodiesel raw material). It would taste different. I also agree that meat would also be less of a threat to human health than it is now. Eating cows would still be aesthetically and morally questionable however, and, if one really wants biodiesel, far less productive than planting low water triglyceride producing plants like rapeseed.

Both meat and biodiesel (if totally obtained from tallow) would be enormously more expensive if obtained from grass fed cows.

[midnight armadillo]

6. Yes, different economics

Absolutely true, every word. The economics of food that is not based on massive inputs of fossil-derived chemicals will be very different, and will likely involve a lot more backyard gardening and less meat. In WWII victory gardens supplied about 50% of the country's veggies.

Factory farming is only cheaper because the costs are externalized. No one is billed for the destruction in the Gulf of Mexico in the oxygen-free 'death zones' caused by fertilizer and manure runoff. The massive use of antibiotics in farming and associated rise in human infectious diseases becoming drug-resistant is also not factored into the cost. Etc, etc. etc.

Personally, I see nothing morally questionable about eating animals - we do have canine teeth for a reason, having evolved to eat high-caloric-density foods like, well, meat. I do feel strongly that the animals should be treated humanely and have a pleasant existence by animal standards, followed by humane slaughter and full use of their resources. But this isn't the 'vegan/carnivore' board so I'll stop here ;-)

[treepig]

2. it all sounds good and fine

but i'd be worried about putting mad cow biodiesel in my car and then have it weave down the road in a crazy manner. dwi convictions are something i'd rather stay as far away from as possible, the EFSA's panel's psuedoscientific, halliburton-paid-for reassurances notwithstanding.

[Squeech]

5. These guys claim they're doing it already

http://www.changingworldtech.com/home.html

They say they have a pilot plant in Philadelphia, cooking up the usual municipal trash and garbage, and a bigger plant in Carthage, MO, next door to a poultry processing plant, fine-tuned to deal with the turkey offal. They say that what they get out of their process is: water, flammable gases (which get burned to heat their oven), flammable liquid hydrocarbons, and inorganic solids. And that's it.

They say their process is adaptable to any waste stream, but they don't seem to be saying anything about how they deal with toxins like heavy metals or halogens. And in fact, none of their web pages seem to have been updated in over a year...

[NickB79]

7. But the prions responsible for TSE's don't denature at 133C

It takes many hundreds of degrees C above that level to denature the prion proteins that cause BSE. How can they conclude that 20 min at 133C is sufficient to remove the TSE risk?

[NNadir]

8. I think they are heating to 133C in sodium hydroxide.

Even a prion can be hydrolyzed.