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One of Romania's largest chicken meat producers, Transavia, which produces 120,000 tons per year, owns three slaughterhouses. The largest of these is located in Oiejdea, Alba County. To utilize waste from the slaughterhouses, the company also established a protein meal factory.
Everything not edible from the bird, such as feathers or viscera, is collected separately and processed into four products:
- feather meal
- meat meal
- blood meal
- poultry fat
Each day, the factory processes 150 tons of waste, from which it obtains 30-40 tons of protein meals and fats. All are sold abroad. The meal is purchased by companies that produce animal feed, and the fat by companies that make biodiesel. The company thus earns money from waste for which it would otherwise have had to pay.
Toader Popa, Director of Transavia Industrialization Division: "You can send it for neutralization, but I can't tell you the costs involved in its destruction. It consumes resources, we're talking about energy, electricity, gas and so on... and you don't recover anything. You just have an enormous expense. By doing this, we, besides recovering all our energy costs, also add value and the business is much more sustainable and much healthier from all points of view, because we control the entire link in the process and we have always been concerned about this aspect."
The protein meal factory is just one of the strategies supporting the company's "Zero waste" policy. The company tries to reuse everything that can be reused not only from slaughterhouses, but also from all 31 poultry farms it has established in more than 30 years of activity.
Diana Pavel, the company's environmental director, says that any waste resulting from an upstream activity is treated in a downstream activity, still within the company. And that in this way 99% of waste is utilized.
How? We asked.
"If the raw material, resulting from plant farms, is used in the compound feed factory, the secondary products, as I like to call them and not waste, are then used as raw materials in the main activity of poultry farming. And here I refer to vegetable residues, to straw, which are used as bedding for poultry.
If from the activity of the compound feed factory we have a raw material that goes to poultry farms, we also have a secondary material. These are vegetable residues, seed hulls, which we also give to be used in agriculture, either for animal husbandry or in agriculture." (Diana Pavel, Transavia Environmental Director).
Manure transformed into a resource
To control the entire value chain, in 2011 the company also established plant farms, in addition to chicken farms. It purchased 10,000 hectares of land in Aiton, Cluj County, where it cultivates sunflowers, corn, and wheat for poultry feed. And the manure from the chicken farms becomes organic fertilizer.
The company thus obtains this organic fertilizer free of charge from its own poultry farms, and this helps it use up to 70% less chemical fertilizer, which it would otherwise have had to pay for.
Adrian Farcaș, Transavia Plant Sector Director:
"On the land where we started the agrochemical study, from 2011 until now, and using natural fertilizer, we have noticed a production increase of over 40% compared to classic fertilizer.
And financially it's an advantage, because lately the trend of chemical fertilizers has been increasing. It's a challenge nowadays to buy chemical fertilizer, considering that we no longer have any factory in Romania that produces chemical fertilizer. Most chemical fertilizer comes from exports."
The only disadvantage of this type of fertilizer is the smell, says Adrian Farcaș. But it lasts at most 2-3 days and is only in the area where it is spread.
Sludge used as fertilizer
For the company, however, the advantages are much greater. Expanding into agriculture has helped it valorize another waste product it produces in large quantities: sludge from its six own wastewater treatment plants. Since 2021, sludge has also been used as organic fertilizer on cultivated cereal fields.
Many of these circular economy measures have been implemented voluntarily, primarily for the economic advantage: cost efficiency, resource efficiency, and reduced dependence on external suppliers.
However, some measures could become mandatory for all large agri-food companies with the implementation of the European "Farm to Fork" strategy. The strategy, launched in 2020, sets clear targets for reducing pesticides, fertilizers, and food waste in the food sector, which is responsible for 26% of EU greenhouse gas emissions.
Discover how a company can become more competitive through such circular economy measures in episode 14 of the campaign "A Second Life. Circular Economy Models", created by Sustainable Solutions Association with the help of environmental consulting company Stratos. A project initiated with the aim of accelerating Romania's green transition by providing examples of good practice from the business environment.
The other 13 episodes can be seen here.
