Toward profitable and sustainable bioresource management in the Australian red meat processing industry: A critical review and illustrative case study

Abstract

The Australian Red Meat Processing (RMP) industry is challenged with ever increasing environmental pressures to reduce their environmental footprint. Wastewater is high strength and requires quality treatment to prevent pollution of surface and ground waters; while much of the solid waste produced is organic and is suitable for land-based disposal. Stricter environmental standards and greater community expectations as well as increasing costs for water, energy and waste disposal require the reduction of resource consumption. This represents an opportunity for the RMP industry to adopt innovative technologies to use bioresources produced on site to increase the plants profitability. This article provides a critical review of solid and liquid waste management at RMP plants outlining the current trends in bioenergy, biofertiliser and value-add byproducts production. The review proceeds to place these developments through an illustrative case study of investigations undertaken at one of Australia’s largest RMP plants investigating technologies and processes to reuse, recycle, and dispose of organic liquid and solid waste. The three main lines of investigation include biogas optimization, reuse of paunch as a fertilizer and opportunities for blood products. Key results from the case study include: 1. Natural gas consumption could be offset with biogas to reduce yearly energy expenditure by up to a further ≈25% by operating lagoons under optimal mesophilic conditions (38 °C); 2. Nitrogen fertilizer replacement value of paunch was found to be comparable to other organic materials used for land application; and 3. The recovery of blood products can yield up to AUD10.5M pa for the enterprise.

Keywords:

• Anaerobic digestion
• biofertilzer
• biogas
• blood products
• recycling of abattoir-derived waste
• slaughterhouse waste

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Center for Agricultural Engineering at the University of Southern Queensland (Toowoomba, QLD, Australia) for financial and operational support to conduct this research.

Additional information

Funding

This work was fully supported by the Queensland Government’s Advance Queensland Research Fellowships Program (https://advance.qld.gov.au/universities-and-researchers/industry-research-fellowships.). The work pertaining to crust management and fertilizer potential of paunch was fully supported by the Australian Meat Processing Corporation (AMPC, https://www.ampc.com.au/.) and Meat Livestock Australia (Meat and Livestock Australia, https://www.mla.com.au/). Support provided by staff at NH Foods Oakey Exports (Oakey, QLD, Australia) is gratefully acknowledged.