Rendering is a booming industry worth more than $10 billion today—the only difference is, the products the plants create have changed.

The Farmland Food Plant in Milan, Missouri, for example, uses the inedible parts of hogs—blood, glands, bone, fat, and skin—to produce everything from biofuels and fertilizers to insulin, pet food, and livestock feed. And why not? Americans only consume a little more than half of the meat produced by livestock, leaving the rest for either waste or reuse.

It's not just hogs rendered in factories across the U.S. either. Cows, sheep, and poultry also get the recycling treatment. Cows are particularly productive: Their protein can be used as a nutritional supplement in livestock feed, while their fats and oils can be used for crayons, shaving cream, detergent, and even dynamite (produced from glycerin in the fat). All in all, the rendering means that only about 4 percent of meat product is lost to waste in North America, as NPR pointed out a few months back.

"Rendering is an extremely green process," Jessica Meisinger, a director at the National Renderers Association, tells me in an email. "Rendering takes this extra [product] and uses it rather than sending it to the landfill or composting—both of which allow natural decay to occur which results in large amounts of greenhouse gases."

Wow is that spin.

Rendering is a process that maximizes the profit of slaughtering animals.

How is that for anti-spin?

Excellent.  The article was sponsored by Shell Oil.

Found this though:

http://pandawhale.com/post/35773/this-sheep-pig-produces-the-worlds-greatest-bacon

I forgot about the Sheep Pig! Thank you for linking to it again.

Mmmmm... Sheep Pig...