Rendering

Rothsay, a member of Maple Leaf Foods, is Canada’s largest rendering company and has been in business for over 50 years. The company operates six processing facilities across Canada that collect and recycle over 700 million kilograms of waste material each year. This waste is rendered and transformed into tallow, oils and proteins for use in animal feed, soaps, cleaners, cosmetics and Biodiesel.

Biodiesel

In 2001, Rothsay began to build and operate a small pilot plant in our Montreal Rendering facility producing biodiesel using recycled materials such as inedible fats and used cooking oil. During this time Rothsay’s Biodiesel was used to support additional demonstration projects such as Montreal’s BioBus and BioMer projects.

By 2006 Rothsay had built and commissioned Canada’s first commercial-scale biodiesel plant with a rated capacity of approximately 30 million litres per year. By 2008 the facility was producing at full capacity.

Today – the plant is producing some of the world’s purist biodiesel from recycled materials and is running well above nameplate capacity at a rate of 45 million litres per year.

A Highly Integrated and Sustainable Business Model

What separates Rothsay Biodiesel from other Biofuel producers is our highly integrated and sustainable business model. As a member of Maple Leaf Foods, we span the value chain from our Live Hog and Poultry operations, to our primary processing and rendering operations.

Maple Leaf Foods raises live hogs and poultry for processing at Maple Leaf facilities around the country.
Of the animals processed for consumption only a portion of these are considered edible: 50% of a cow, 60% of a hog and 72% of a chicken; the remainder, some 2.5 billion kilograms in Canada annually, are recaptured by the rendering industry and converted to other value added products.

Rothsay Biodiesel has an uninterrupted supply of raw materials using the tallow and recycled cooking oils produced at its rendering facilities to produce Biodiesel, a clean, renewable low-carbon alternative to petroleum diesel. By co-locating our biodiesel plant at existing operations we are able to further lower our environmental footprint through more efficient use of existing resources.

We are also uniquely positioned to be able to integrate forward in the value chain by utilizing biodiesel blends in our own commercial truck fleet. We use biodiesel to power 127 heavy duty commercial trucks at three locations year round with blends ranging between 2%-100%. This year alone these trucks have traveled 4.4 million Kilometers at an average blend of 12%, allowing us to reduce CO2 emissions by approximately 782,000 kilograms.

Fueling our own truck fleet with lower-carbon alternatives like biodiesel not only improves our environmental footprint, but also those of our customers. By having Rothsay trucks pick-up our customers’ waste products, our clients are given a unique opportunity to improve the sustainability of their operations as well.