Cows continue to have a disastrous environmental impact long
after they meat their unhappy fate at the slaughterhouse. In
order to keep America Mad Cow Disease-free, the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration outlawed the practice of turning byproducts
of slaughtered animals into feed, leaving mounds of chemically-
treated meat and bone meal (MBM) to accumulate in landfills. Not
anymore, says the American Chemical Society (ACS). The ACS
recently announced that they can mitigate that waste by using
MBM instead of petroleum or natural gas to produce a partially
biodegradeable plastic that not only clears landfills, but also
reduces our reliance on fossil fuels. Following the 1997 FDA ban
on feeding animal scraps back to livestock, 9 billion pounds of
meat and bone meal have gone to waste each year. The current
policy is to treat leftover MBM with powerful chemicals that
eliminate any trace of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)
before tossing the noxious concoction into special landfills.
The ACS solves a pressing