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We have seen a letter from the energy minister saying the government will pull the plug on key funding to facilities that process chicken waste
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Without the money, a number of these plants will close – leaving colossal quantities of chicken excrement needing to be disposed of
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The excess waste is likely to be spread on farmland, which causes toxic runoff that can poison the air, land and water
The UK has become addicted to chicken. In our supermarkets, whole birds roast on spits behind the poultry counter while wings, drumsticks and nuggets line the aisles. In high streets and town centres, the country’s fried chicken shops – with their bright strip lighting, plastic tables and cheap buckets of wings – have become something of a national institution. And in our pubs, restaurants and cafes, chicken is the mainstay of a thousand menus.
To meet this insatiable demand, around a billion chickens are slaughtered in the UK annually. And those birds produce an immense volume of waste: each year, the poultry industry generates as much as 2.4 million tonnes of chicken litter (an unsavoury mix of faeces, urine and bedding materials), the equivalent of 100 Titanics. Disposing of such a prodigious amount of excrement – which can poison our land, air and waterways – has become a major headache.
One common method is to send it to be burned or processed at plants that use it to generate energy, some of which rely on multimillion-pound subsidies from the taxpayer.
Now, we and our colleagues at Grilled have learned that the government is planning to put a stop to these payments. Behind closed doors, industry chiefs have warned the government that the move could spark a “waste management crisis”.
In a letter sent this month, energy minister Michael Shanks said the government does not intend to renew the subsidy support scheme for “small-scale biomass generators” – plants that convert organic waste into energy – which will expire in early 2027.
The revelations have alarmed environmentalists who say that the current chicken-waste situation is unsustainable – and that government plans to expand the poultry industry will fuel the problem further. Campaigners have also raised the question of whether public money should be spent cleaning up the chicken industry’s waste problem in the first place.
Spreading the load
One of the companies hit hardest by the move will be Melton Renewable Energy, which runs three biomass plants that between them process 600,000 tonnes of poultry litter a year. More than half of Melton’s income for these projects comes from taxpayer support. Without it, they will be forced to close.
Shanks’s letter rebuffed Melton’s proposal of “transitional support” for the next few years, and while it mentioned finding an “alternative route for safe and sustainable disposal” of chicken waste, what that will mean in practice remains unclear. (Defra’s impact assessment is understood to be ongoing.) It seems likely, however, that most of it will be used as fertiliser and spread on farmland – a practice that comes with its own major issues.
When chicken litter is used in this way, the resulting “run-off” into nearby waterways can be disastrous. It has been linked to nitrogen pollution in various British rivers, as well as the contamination of the River Wye in Herefordshire and, according to some reports, the poisoning of Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland, the UK’s largest inland water source.
Though there are limits on the amount of manure you can spread in so-called “nitrate vulnerable zones”, which make up a big share of English farmland, enforcement is weak and prosecutions are rare.
The litter burned by Melton represents between 25-40% of what’s produced by the UK poultry meat sector, so the implications for these closures are huge. We’ve also seen multiple planning applications for new chicken farms that intend to dispose of their waste via Melton’s power stations.
Melton’s three waste-burning plants have received a combined £649m since 2010-11, according to data obtained by Grilled. Melton also told us it buys its poultry litter from farmers, meaning taxpayer subsidy has effectively been funding payments back to the industry that produces the waste.
For all that expenditure, the energy generated is modest. While Melton CEO Eddie Wilkinson told us the government’s decision could have “serious consequences the UK’s energy system”, the three plants produced 405 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2025, or around 0.13% of UK electricity demand. To put it in other words, they are effectively waste-disposal facilities that happen to generate a small amount of power.
“If [Melton’s plant in] Thetford closes, it’s hard to believe that quantity of poultry litter can suddenly be handled sustainably,” Jonathan Scurlock, founder of the consultancy Renewable Energy in Agriculture and an expert in land-based renewables, told Grilled.
“The concern is that much of it will end up spread on land – adding to an already significant nitrogen pollution problem.”
Signs of crisis
We have also learnt that the British Poultry Council (BPC) and Moy Park, a subsidiary of Brazilian meat giant JBS, had lobbied the government to preserve Melton’s subsidy. In correspondence obtained by Grilled using environmental information laws, the BPC warned ministers that losing the plants risked a “waste management crisis”, while Moy Park told Defra the uncertainty was affecting its investment and planning.
Their efforts were in vain. Staff at Melton’s plants have been told that consultation on closures and redundancies is expected to begin in December.
Richard Griffiths, chief executive at the BPC, said its members “are exploring alternative capacity to ensure [chicken waste] continues to support renewable energy production and the UK’s domestic energy supply”.
“Where appropriate,” he added, “poultry meat litter can also be applied to land in line with nutrient management plans, helping reduce reliance on manufactured fertilisers, which are energy-intensive to produce and heavily dependent on imports.”
Defra told us that it is currently working to draw up a simplified and “robust” piece of legislation around the spreading of poultry litter on farmland. But for now, it is controlled by water regulations.
“Chicken producers are part of an intensive poultry industry implicated in the ecological collapse of some of our most iconic rivers and lakes,” Amy Fairman, head of campaigns at River Action, told Grilled.
“They profit from cheap chicken sold through major supermarkets and fast-food chains, yet taxpayers have provided more than £640m to subsidise the burning of the vast quantities of manure this model generates.”
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