Recycling poultry feathers: more bang for the cluck.

1 1i 1T 1 F"" What happens when an industry's by-product turns out to be as valuable as its primary products? The poultry industry may be about to find out. Scientists are exploring new methods for turning the industry's excess fluff into products ranging from notepaper to auto body parts to high-quality animal feed, saving trees and replacing man-made materials in the process. The National Chicken Council, a Washington, DC-based poultry trade group, predicts that more than 8.5 billion chickens will be commercially grown and processed in the United States this year. These chickens, when processed, will leave behind more than 2.3 billion pounds of feathers. For the competitive poultry industry, the challenge is to turn the white plumes into valuable new products that add to the company's bottom line. Though there has been significant controversy in recent years over the human health effects of poultry wastes, especially used litter and processing plant wastewater that ends up in waterways, chicken feathers are relatively clean and do not generally pose a health risk. Contamination of feathers with chicken blood and feces can present a problem , but in general feathers are continuously removed from the processing area to make room for new feathers as more chickens are processed. An average chicken processing plant churns out 4,000 pounds of feathers an hour and has a low profit margin per bird, so feathers must be moved or processed quickly and very inexpensively. The Keratin Connection Feathers are made of keratin, the same tough, tightly wound protein fiber that makes up hair, wool, fingernails, and hooves. Walter Schmidt, a research chemist at the Beltsville, Maryland, branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS), has found a new way to process poultry feathers into valuable fibers that can be made into other products. Schmidt, whose background is in physical and analytical chemistry, began working with feather keratin because he was studying another fibrous protein, collagen, and wanted to compare the physical properties of the two. But he noticed that the feather protein had properties in common with another fibrous material, as well: cellu