The Philippine broiler industry raises hundreds of millions of birds a year, in houses that are cleaned out every cycle. What comes out is litter: manure mixed with rice husk or wood shavings, at 20 to 40% moisture, with a heating value on a dry basis of 9 to 13 megajoules a kilogram. Most of it is sold cheaply as fertiliser, spread on land near the farm, or piled. It has been burned as a boiler fuel in the United Kingdom and the United States since the 1990s.
Compiled in September 2026 from the releases of the time, with the revisions the agencies have published since. Nothing here is a forecast.
What makes it different from husk
Nitrogen, chlorine and potassium. Litter has more of all three than a crop residue, which means more nitrogen oxides in the flue gas, more corrosion in the boiler, and an ash that slags at lower temperatures. A litter plant is designed around those properties: a moving grate rather than a fluidised bed, lower steam temperatures, and flue-gas treatment sized for the nitrogen. It is a purpose-built plant, not a converted one.
The ash
Litter ash is rich in phosphate and potassium and is sold as a fertiliser in the countries that burn litter at scale. That turns the disposal problem into two products: heat and a saleable mineral. It also means the nutrients that would have gone to the land go there still, without the pathogens and the odour.
Where the fuel is
Integrated poultry companies operate hundreds of houses within a region and clean them on a schedule, which gives a plant a fuel supply with a contract and a calendar. A single farm does not; a feed mill or a processing plant in the middle of a growing area does. The heat has a customer at the processing plant, which raises steam for scalding, rendering and cleaning, usually on fuel oil.
The regulatory frame
A litter plant is a biomass plant under the Renewable Energy Act, with the same incentives, and a Clean Air Act source with emission limits that its flue-gas treatment has to meet. Both are routine. The question a company has to answer first is what its litter costs it today, in handling, in land, in complaints and in the fuel oil it buys for steam.
The poultry and livestock page sets out litter and manure together.
If your site runs a fuel-fired boiler or produces an organic residue, an energy and waste audit puts your own numbers against this. Tell us about your site and an engineer replies with the data we need. The figures behind each quarter are in the quarterly market brief.
The next step
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