A business based in New Castle, Delaware, wants to recycle processed animal waste in an area covered by Coastal Zone Act restrictions, in the Riveredge Industrial Park along the Delaware River just south of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, reports Delaware Online.

Green Recovery Technologies LLC applied for the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control ruling to cover an operation. The plant would extract feed-type proteins from poultry or meat plant wastewater skimmings.

Officials with the company could not be reached by the newspaper but their application estimated that the plant could extract two tanker trucks of fats and a partial truckload of protein and water from about two truckloads daily of 'dissolved air flotation' wastes from poultry plant wastewater.

That category of waste has ranked at times as an environmental headache, especially on the Delmarva Peninsula, one of the country’s larger poultry producing regions. Producers often arrange for use of the materials as a farm field fertiliser or compost ingredient, sometimes at significant cost, or send it to rendering plants.

About 565 million broilers, Cornish hens and larger roaster chickens were produced and processed on the Delmarva Peninsula in 2012, including 212 million in Delaware.

Riveredge is inside Delaware’s Coastal Zone, a 275,000-acre buffer strip along the Delaware River, Delaware Bay and Atlantic coast that is currently off limits to new heavy industries. Rules of the programme in some cases require environmental offsets in exchange for approvals to build or expand light industries.

The offsets, such as pollution control systems or recycling arrangements, must more than cancel out the amounts of any new pollutants emerging from new or expanded operations.

Although the company’s Coastal Zone application focused on poultry wastewater, its web site included more general terms and said that an effort is underway to assemble a network of suppliers for the operation, reports Delaware Online. Its mission statement included work to supply 'novel proteins and fats to the pet nutrition market'.

“We have been testing our technology in a scaled pilot plant with the cooperation of major protein producers,” the web site noted.

A flammable gas, not identified in the application, would be used as a solvent in a system shielded with inert nitrogen gas to prevent fires.

Other details on the plant’s potential capacity or service area were unavailable.

Dan Shortridge, spokesman for Delaware’s Department of Agriculture, told the newspaper hat the agency is not familiar with Green Recovery’s proposal.

Bill Satterfield, spokesman for Georgetown-based Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc., said that he was unaware of the proposal, and said that “plenty of capacity” is available in existing rendering plants.

The proposal adds to a growing list of recycling or re-use type projects across the state, particularly in northern Delaware, where private businesses have invested in or attempted ventures involving recovery of everything from construction and demolition waste industrial-scale composting and sewage treatment plant sludge.

Last year, adds the Delaware Online report, two companies sought exemptions from a state-wide ban on new incinerators to allow construction of enclosed, high temperature treatment systems that would convert poultry manure or chopped tires into a charcoal-like substance, potentially extracting fuels as well. Both plans were criticised as unproven by some environmental groups, and neither has received approval to proceed.