Agriculture committee  I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to express the views of the rendering industry to this committee. My name is Graham Clarke, and I'm an independent consultant who represents the Canadian Renderers Association in Ottawa. With me I have Mr. André Couture, the chairman of t

Agriculture committee  In answer to your question, during the negotiations on and the investigation into the logistics of SRM disposal, and before the rules were even finalized, a large amount of work did go into regional workshops in each province to look at alternative sources and disposal issues, in

Agriculture committee  Sure, but maybe Mr. Couture could tell you about the kinds of costs involved in something like that.

Agriculture committee  I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to express the views of the rendering industry to this committee. My name is Graham Clarke. I am an independent consultant who represents the Canadian Renderers Association in Ottawa. The membership of the Canadian Renderers Associati

Agriculture committee  Rothsay has a biodiesel plant in Montreal. I don't know the exact volume, but it's substantial. One of the major challenges right now is to export used cooking oil and restaurant grease to Europe for their biodiesel industry. This is quite important because it provides a very goo

Agriculture committee  Certainly. The price of fuel, as you know, is very high. With fats and oils you're looking at a price of around $1,000 per tonne. It's expensive. Grease theft has increased greatly in the last 24 months. In the U.S. last year they estimated that $39 million of material was being

Agriculture committee  Yes. I mean, the major source of raw material is from the packing industry, such as Cargill, XL, and all the big packers.

Agriculture committee  So that's the major source. Then, of course, in the past, deadstock has been a fairly substantial source. Before BSE, Sanimax alone had 50,000 pickup points in Quebec for deadstock. It was pretty much every farm. As has been pointed out—not in every province, but depending on

Agriculture committee  You talk about the supply chain, but the value chain is actually not a linear chain. It's a circle.

Agriculture committee  A lot of those protein meals are fed as animal feed, pet food, and for domestic animals.

Agriculture committee  It fluctuates. It's a supply and demand situation. The world in general is protein short. The reason for that, of course, is largely aquaculture. Aquaculture in Asia and so on is growing. If you look at the graph of growth, it's almost vertical. There is a huge demand for protein

Agriculture committee  Tallow is a major export, of course, to Asia and so on. It's a high-value export, and there's huge demand around the world for that for soap and so on. So we are a major exporter of tallow, especially into Asia. Ruminant meat and bone meal go to Indonesia and the Philippines, but

Agriculture committee  Commodity prices go up and down substantially, so three years ago.... Well, you know, they can be quite unstable, but they were still in a fairly high range. I would estimate, I don't know for sure, but probably around $900 a tonne. It has gone up recently to around $1,200, so th

Agriculture committee  I would say the bigger risk is the huge demand in Asia for animal fats. Recently a company in Singapore has been buying up fat in huge quantities worldwide. They were at meetings with the North American rendering associations, lobbying all the companies. So the rendering industry

Agriculture committee  It's a global problem because the increase in consumption in Asian countries, for example, or in central South America where the middle-income groups are becoming more dependent on a meat diet, you're seeing this demand for both protein meals and fat going up. As I say, the globa