Nailing Down the Sustainability of Processing Waste Isn’t Easy

Here’s an article on waste oil recycling that a friend sent me earlier.  Every time I see something like this I wonder about the overall sustainability of the enterprise.  Obviously, waste grease doesn’t collect, purify, and distribute itself.  Is all this activity really worthwhile? 

I came across an article yesterday whose purpose was to expose the appalling quantity of fossil fuel that goes into supporting the lifespan of the typical pet dog.  This, in turn, reminded me of how difficult and unfair these analyses can be, or, putting it another way, how easy it is to prove that 2 + 2 = 5 in this arena.

Obviously, if we were growing cows to generate the animal protein for dogs, this would be environmentally catastrophic, but that’s almost never the case.  In the real world, dog food is produced from a great variety of waste sources that would need some sort of other disposal if it weren’t for dog food.  Some of these are more disgusting than others (I’ll spare you the details), but all of them are unfit for human consumption.  They are either the byproducts of delivering us the meats we eat, or they come from one of dozens of other supplies, e.g., the many million horses (of the total planetary population of roughly 58 million) that die each year.

Establishing the actual carbon footprint of all this isn’t easy, which means that the subject is amenable to gross manipulation.