When we reach for the most sustainable, wildlife-friendly foods available, we’re doing our best to consider the full effects of our diets on the planet. We want food grown fairly and without the ravages of deforestation, habitat loss, pesticides, cruelty, and climate change.
But even when we choose to eat less meat to reduce those impacts, the reality is that it requires processing in slaughterhouses, an overlooked source of harm to wildlife and human communities in the food chain. That’s why the Center works to hold these meat-processing and packing plants accountable to environmental laws and to push for the laws we need.
In April the Center sued Colorado Gov. Jared Polis’ administration for failing to require a cattle slaughterhouse owned by multinational meat company JBS to follow state and federal clean-air laws to protect Colorado communities.
As one of the largest slaughterhouses in Colorado, JBS’s plant — in the town of Greeley — is a significant source of air pollution. It slaughters, skins, renders, and disposes of thousands of cattle every day while spewing air pollution from boilers, cookers, dryers, and chemicals used in wastewater treatment.
The JBS facility has the potential to release thousands of tons of harmful pollutants every year, including particulate matter, ammonia, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and methane gas.
Large air-pollution sources like slaughterhouses must obtain operating permits. Our lawsuit targets the Colorado Air Pollution Control Division for failing to meet a legally required deadline for approving the permit for the Greeley slaughterhouse. By law the Air Pollution Control Division was required to grant or deny JBS’s application within 18 months. But four years after the application, it had neither issued a permit nor corrected ongoing, unpermitted pollution — violating the Clean Air Act and giving JBS a free pass to pollute.
The Center also filed a notice of our intent to sue JBS for operating without a legally required permit for more than five years. Without that permit JBS is prohibited by the Clean Air Act from operating its facility.
We’ve sued this company before for polluting Colorado waterways with toxic slaughter waste. JBS is among the biggest companies controlling most of the meat consumed in the United States. But it’s not the only one. The Center filed a similar lawsuit in Colorado last December over a Cargill slaughterhouse northeast of Denver.
Slaughterhouses produce millions of pounds of pollution each year. They discharge water contaminated with blood, oil, grease and fats, ammonia, dangerous fecal bacteria, and excrement.
According to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, they’re among the largest industrial sources of nitrogen introduced into waterways and a top producer of phosphorus — both of which impair water quality by activating algae growth and depleting the oxygen supply. That leads to dead zones and harms species like largemouth bass, bluegill, catfish, eels, mussels, crabs, and crayfish.
Every year in the United States, nearly 10 billion animals are processed into 105 billion pounds of beef, pork, chicken, turkey, mutton, veal, and lamb. As U.S. meat consumption grows, more slaughter facilities endanger air quality and the health of watersheds, wildlife, and people. Environmental laws like the Clean Air Act (and the Clean Water Act) are crucial to our ability to hold polluters accountable.
As the Center’s cases work their way through the legal system, we can all help combat slaughterhouse pollution by advocating for less-meat-heavy diets at home, at school, in workplaces, and in our communities.
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For the wild,
