Vectors of Contagion to Sources of Raw Materials: Regulating German Knackers’ Yards, 1871-1939
In the late nineteenth century, how and why did governments begin to see animal carcasses both as “toxic waste” as well as a previously unexploited “natural” resource? What can the regulatory history of animal byproducts contribute to contemporary discussions of “the circular economy” and the tensions between conservation and extraction in “sustainable development”? This paper answers these questions by charting the various attempts to regulate knacker's yards (Abdeckereien) in Germany from 1871 to the outbreak of the Second World War. Since the Middle Ages, knackers had taken dead animals, removed the hides, skins, hooves, and horns and then boiled their carcasses, skimming the fat and drying the resulting sludge—selling all these byproducts to local manufacturers and farmers. Even as nineteenth century urbanization and industrialization increased the range of marketable byproducts (blood became animal feed; tendons glue; fats tallow; bones ammonia, gelatins and fertilizer), traditional practices of burial, exposure, and crude boiling prevailed throughout Germany. Beginning in the 1880s, the desire to maximize profits, the justified fears of animal-born diseases, and new ideas from agricultural chemistry about the nitrogen cycle contributed to legislation that instituted sanitary oversight and introduced the idea that the “harmless disposal” of animal carcasses (a potential source of contagion) could contribute to “national wealth.” Though regulations such as the 1880 Animal Disease Law (as well as its revisions in 1909), the 1900 Meat Inspection Law, a 1911 Animal Carcass Disposal Law, and wartime decrees in 1916, put strict controls on slaughterhouses, they had little effect on knackers. Only with the passage of the 1939 Animal Disposal Law under Nazi rule, were knackers' yards licensed, required to thermally process carcasses, and integrated into a large network of rendering facilities distributed throughout Germany. This legislative history reveals the success and failures of state intervention into the “waste” business.
