 West Coast Reduction Ltd. is a Vancouver based, family owned and operated business with its roots extending back over seventy years to a time when its founder owned and operated a butcher shop.
Now the largest independent renderer in Western Canada, West Coast Reduction conducts operations from facilities in Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, Vancouver and Nanaimo.
From its facilities, West Coast Reduction provides a necessary service to farms, feedlots, restaurants, butcher shops, super markets and processors of beef, pork, poultry and fish products intended for human consumption. This necessary service includes:
- The provision of containers to receive meat and fish by-products deemed unsuitable for human consumption.
- The regular pick-up and transfer of these by-products to the nearest rendering plant where they are processed into useful rendered finished products
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Each week, West Coast renders a combined total of more than 10,000 tonnes of beef, pork, poultry and fish by-products, referred to as raw materials. This volume of raw materials is enough to fill 1,000 trucks each week and is rendered without delay to limit odour and decay. Rendering reduces raw material volume by approximately 50% and the finished products resulting from rendering are inert, stable and safe for a variety of uses. Land filling of raw materials is generally not permitted and is, in any event, not feasible because land filling does not reduce volume except by decomposition and decay. Decomposing materials, unless buried, smell and have the potential to attract vectors and spread disease.
Rendering is a recycling process which involves converting raw materials into useful finished products by first cooking the raw materials and then pressing oil (tallow) out of rendered products before milling them.
The cooking or reduction process is done at high temperatures in large, enclosed continuous plants designed to minimize cooking odours while inactivating pathogens and evaporating moisture. Cooking odours, emitted from the rendering process are scrubbed or passed through a thermal oxidizer before being discharged to the environment. Evaporated moisture is subject to municipally monitored waste water treatment procedures designed to remove undissolved organic matter before being discharged as water into city sewers.
West Coast Reduction's plants operate under permits issued by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and each plant is required to comply with local, provincial and federal health, safety and environmental standards. Quality assurance is achieved through the universal implementation of a custom designed hazard analysis quality assurance program (HACCP). HACCP is designed to monitor and provide regular daily feedback on operating standards and procedures and serves to meet finished product customer standards and verify compliance with regulatory requirements.
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