IRISH BEEF processing plants have been found to rank among the best in the world when it comes to reducing the impact of processing on the environment, according to an Enterprise Ireland commissioned report.
Sustainable Practices in Irish Beef Processing studied 16 beef plants over five years and found them to be fully compliant with EU and Irish environmental laws.
In that period, there had been a 57 per cent reduction of nitrogen emission to water and a 40 per cent reduction in Biological Oxygen Demand by cutting the amount of contaminants such as blood and manure to water.
Using key performance indicators, the report found Irish plants were now more efficient and sophisticated, carrying out a full range of processing activities to generate new products, some of which would previously have been binned as waste.
The new activities included cutting and boning to produce retail cuts, curing, cooking, canning, processing of by-products like offal and fat, packing, freezing and cold-storage.
“Per animal, the quantity of recycled waste increased by 17 per cent, the majority of this material . . . was rendered to produce tallow as a fuel, and meat bone meal as an animal feed,” the report noted. “Tallow is a renewable, zero-carbon fuel . . . [it] contributed 13 per cent of total energy for the beef processing sector in 2005.”
The author of the report, Robert Geraghty, said the key challenge for the Irish beef processing sector now was to find ways to reduce the amount of energy used while maintaining exemplary hygiene, quality and environmental standards.
He identified a range of short, medium and long-term actions to do this, ranging from simple actions like switching off non-essential equipment when not in use to to using waste as an alternative source of energy.
“A 5 per cent reduction in energy consumption across the Irish beef sector would have the effect of reducing energy costs by as much as € 15 million,” he concluded.