A wholesale candle company, Darling International, has been in business 127 years making candles, soaps and other decorative goods.  The Phoenicians and Romans honed the practice of rendering animal byproducts to make the soaps and candles and the Darling International has turned it into a science and a big business.  The Darling International company has become the largest independent renderer in the nation.  The Irving Texas company picks up grease, fats and animal carcasses from local restaurants and slaughterhouses, including McDonald’s, and as much of an oddball industry as it is, they are the largest in that industry.

However lately the Darling International company has decided that it needs to keep up with the times and that means introducing a different way of making candles and helping their plants to go eco-friendly.  They have discovered renewable fuel when the giant Honeywell approached Darling offering them the license technology to make “green diesel” fueled by using animal fats. For over 30 years biodiesel has been made by combining vegetable oil and diesel. This concoction gums up engines and performs poorly in colder weather.

The government – the U.S. Department of Energy – is now offering up to 80% of the cost to build renewable-fuel factories. The Darling company announced it as a merger with Valero energy to build a green diesel plant in Louisiana.

The company is looking into producing soy candles alongside its regular production of candles and soaps using a more earth friendly production process.  The project projected completion date is September 2011 because the Darling International company is in no big hurry to create the plant even though the government is footing most of the bill.  As one executive put it, “there are always going to be restaurants that need to rid themselves of old grease and slaughterhouses that need to rid themselves of animal carcasses.  I don’t see us going out of business anytime soon.”

And one might think with the economy the way it is and people wanting ‘green’ candles, the Darling International would be slowly going out of business; however, they boosted sales last year by 25 percent to $807 million, with profits getting $55 million to rank number 13 on the 2009 Investing Magazine fastest-growing companies list.