Volume 10: Economic Impact and International Trade
4. Where did the economic consequences of BSE finally fall?
Renderers

4.18 BSE had a dramatic impact on renderers. The SBO bans affected their operations and costs by separating their processes into SBO and non-SBO batching. The various feed bans incrementally reduced and, ultimately, virtually eliminated their MBM product line, which they had been selling to feedmills.

4.19 It appears, however, that to a large extent this industry was able to reinvent itself. Before BSE, renderers would purchase otherwise unusable slaughter by-products from slaughterhouses, head boners, knackers and butchers, and would produce and sell tallow and MBM. Ten years on they had become waste disposal firms that charged slaughterhouses and knackers for removing animal wastes from their premises, while retaining their market for tallow.

4.20 It thus appears that, transitional costs aside, renderers were able to transfer their increased running costs and the losses which they suffered from the elimination of their MBM product line to slaughterhouses and other generators of animal waste.