Winners in each of the two categories (undergraduate/graduate and diploma) were presented with first-, second-, and third-place awards of $2,500, $1,000, and $500, respectively.
Jonathan Aleong, a food science undergraduate, and Lena Lam, a marketing management undergraduate student, took top honors in GCRI this year. Their “Orga-Culture” incorporates various protein meals from the rendering industry to create a unique self-fertilizing line of organic gardening products. The duo took second place honors in 2004 with their feather fiber speaker cones.
Feather fibers helped history student Kavita Balabhaskatan and agricultural science students Amanda Hammond, Jennifer MacNaughton, and Kim Waalderbos place second with their “Agri-Post,” a fence post made from recycled agricultural plastics and feather fibers.
There was a tie for third place in the GCRI undergraduate/graduate degree category. Awards went to “Chic Sunscreen,” a product that uses poultry fat and was developed by engineering students Christina Hajdok, Emily Kettel, Hester Knibbe, and Emily Stillwell, and “Renderboard,” a particleboard product created using various rendered products by engineering students Mark Burger, Tara Morton-Bernas, Jennifer Prine, and Lee Weiss.
The award in the diploma category went to agricultural student Darryl Ayris from Ridgetown College for his comparative study on using meat and bone meal as a fertilizer source for corn.
Global Meat Production a Challenge
The National Renderers Association reported in their January-March 2005 The Bulletin that with regard to their ecological consequences, cattle – with a world population of 1.4 billion – are the most dominant species on the globe, so claims Dr. Josef Reichholf, a zoologist at the Technical University of Munich, so much so that a visiting alien would consider it “planet cattle.” The global cattle population exceeds that of pigs (about one billion), but more importantly they weigh so much, produce greenhouse gases, and need so much food, compared to the world’s human population, estimated to be some six billion.
Reichholf estimates that the total number of productive livestock in the world is about 20 billion and their combined body weight – dominated by cattle – is about three times that of the human population.
Since 1948, the world’s human population has increased from about two billion to over six billion today, and is expected to reach eight to 11 billion by 2050. Extrapolating meat production trends, Reichholf, who is a member of the World Wildlife Fund and has written a book, Protein Population Politik, asserts that animal protein needs cannot be met by conventional means and their ecological effects require new solutions.
For example, beef production in Brazil has practically doubled since 1990, from 6.4 million metric tons to over 11 million, and forests are being felled or burned throughout the tropics and subtropics to make way for pasture land and feed crop cultivation.
Speaking in Berlin earlier this year at the launch of his book, Reichholf predicted that global meat production will rise from about 220 million metric tons today to more than 300 million tons by 2030, and said that interdisciplinary cooperation will be needed to cope with the future challenge.
International Report - June 2005 Render