Making Australian Country Choice circular

The challenge

​The red meat processing sector is an important producer of food processing waste in Australia and offers  unique opportunities for closed loop concepts to derive products from waste streams. A range of waste streams within the industry are already being utilised, but could have higher uses to increase the utilisation and value of those waste streams.

Waste generated from animal protein production presents numerous challenges when trying to adapt to a more circular economy, foremost among those challenges are biosafety and biosecurity.The high concentration of nitrogen and fat containing wastes post processing also presents challenges for traditional waste processing strategies.

The majority of the waste generated across the red meat supply chain is produced at the abattoir. Although practices are currently in place to manage this waste, it is unknown if this is the best utilisation of these resources. The industry would significantly benefit from prioritisation of which waste streams could be better managed and identification of techno-economically feasible closed-loop concepts for products derived from the red meat processing waste streams.

Our plan

ACC is dedicated to the best-practice supply of high-quality meat products to domestic and export markets. It is also committed to reducing the volumes of food waste sent to landfill and to increasing the effective use of by-products. This is important to its profitability, to the retailers supplied and to the industry more broadly.

This scoping project with ACC will identify and clarify economically feasible closedloop concepts for ACC and their waste streams. It will explore secondary research on solutions that could be adopted across the red meat processing sector, model the flow of nutrients, energy and water across the supply chain, identify possible closed-loop solutions and identify research needs and gaps for future initiatives.

As ACC is a major red meat supplier to Woolworths the project will work in closely with the Woolworths food waste reduction roadmap project in the ENGAGE program. It will enable investigation into the broad range of options available to reducing waste in their operations and their supply chains. It will contribute to current industry-wide work by Meat and Livestock Australia and the Australian Meat Processor Corporation and possibly identify future funding proposals in conjunction with these organisations. This work sets the scene for greater industry benefits through the identification and prioritisation of products from waste streams.

As this project progresses and achieves its milestones, we’ll share the good news on this page by adding information, links, images, interviews and more.