UK Supermarket Turns 5,000 Tons Of Meat Into Energy
August 7th, 2009 by Jerry James Stone
It’s an odd week for fuel sources. On the heels of a Mountain Dew powered engine, UK supermarket Tesco is getting flack for turning meat into energy–yah, you read that right.
The food chain is burning 5,000 tons of inedible meat for fuel. The biomass processing is being handled by the Cheshire-based PDM Group. The meat-energy is then used to power UK homes via the National Grid.
In fact, Tesco says they dispose of enough old meat to power 600 homes a year!
While other supermarkets have expressed following suit, as you can imagine this doesn’t sit well with animal rights groups.
Justin Kerswell, campaigns manager for Viva (Vegetarians International Voice for Animals UK), explained in an interview to the Daily Mail UK “It’s a sad indictment of modern life that not only hundreds of millions of animals are killed each year in the UK, but so much meat is left over from greed and indifference.”
Tesco says the practice is better than sending it to a landfill.
I tend to agree…with both. If we have enough meat waste to power 600 homes a year, that simply has to end. But these changes don’t happen over night, unfortunately. I am also concerned that this effort could lead to even more complacency about the waste.
Recycling meat is just not efficient. Producing a burger is a hugely carbon intensive process–and kinda gross. Sorry, I’m a veggie folks.
Livestock makes up about 18% of all greenhouse gasses, more than all forms of transportation combined. We aren’t going to offset that buy burning our burgers.