Chicken feather meal is the leftover glop from processing. It’s used for fertilizer and animal feed and is 12% fat. That fat can be used to make biodiesel.
The process is touted as being environmentally friendly and would extract the fat from chicken feather meal using boiling water. Researchers say that removal of the fat content from feather meal makes for both a higher-grade animal feed and a better nitrogen source for fertilizer.
A staggering 11 billion pounds of chicken feather meal is created each year, which could produce up to 153 millions gallons of biodiesel a year. Maybe processing plants could burn their own biodiesel to create electricity. They’d certainly have another income stream too.
The really sick part of this is that a lot of that chicken glop originates in CAFOs and gets fed back to the chickens. Though much of the feather meal gets fed to cows in CAFOs also, now that feeding beef products back to cows is illegal. (And you thought cows were vegetarian?) If we turned it into fuel, those factory farms might have to feed chickens something more costly, like grain and hay!
BTW, some experts say that feather meal makes lousy fertilizer because the nitrogen is unavailable to plants, and lousy feed because of its poor amino acid balance. But they have to do something with it, so by all means let’s turn it into fuel.
Expect the price of meat to rise…
I think they can do both. Separate the fat for biofuel and keep the rest for food / fertilizer.
Feather meal omlette, anyone?