Diamond Green Diesel (DGD), which describes itself as the world’s second-largest renewable diesel producer, shipped at least 25 fuel deliveries worth €1.24 billion to Belgium and the Netherlands between 2025 and 20 April 2026.
The fuel is made partly from beef tallow – a fat extracted during slaughter – sourced from a Brazilian supplier linked to a slaughterhouse operator facing 31 lawsuits over illegal deforestation in the Jaci-Paraná extractive reserve, in the Brazilian state of Rondônia.
“Sustainable” fuel
Biofuels have become a cornerstone of Europe’s plan to clean up its transport sector. Under the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive, transport must cut its greenhouse gas intensity by 14.5% by 2030, a target that would be nearly impossible to meet without them.
The appeal is straightforward: unlike fossil fuels, biofuels are made from organic materials – crops, waste cooking oil, animal fats – that are considered part of a natural carbon cycle. Burn them, the argument goes, and you release carbon that was recently absorbed rather than carbon locked underground for millions of years.
Producers like DGD claim their fuels cut lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80% compared to conventional diesel.
But the system only works if the feedstock is what it claims to be, and if its production did not involve destroying forests.
Disappearing rainforest
Deep in the Brazilian state of Rondônia lies the Jaci-Paraná Extractive Reserve, a protected area that has lost more than three-quarters of its forest to illegal cattle ranching since 1996. Those cattle, raised illegally inside the reserve, entered a supply chain that may be connected to “green” fuel shipped to European ports.
For local indigenous activist Neidinha Suruí, who featured in the 2025 Emmy Award-winning documentary O Território, the damage done by the beef supply chain to the reserve has been “devastating”.
“It is sad to see what has been lost,” she said, adding that “environmental crime only exists because there are companies that buy products derived from environmental crime. If there were no meat processors buying illegally sourced cattle, there would be no land grabbing and no deforestation.”
A tallow-shaped gap
So how does this happen? The answer lies in a gap at the heart of the EU’s certification system.
To ensure biofuels meet sustainability requirements, the EU relies on internationally recognised schemes – primarily the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC EU) – to trace their production.
But when it comes to beef tallow, the trail goes cold at the rendering plant, the facility where animal fat is extracted and purified. The farms where the cattle were raised – and where deforestation occurs – fall entirely outside the system.
The reason: tallow is classified as waste, not as a product of cattle farming. Because the main purpose of a slaughterhouse is meat production, not fat, tallow is treated differently in the EU’s accounting. ISCC, the certification body, confirmed this to our team.
“If there’s tallow coming from land that’s been deforested, then those emissions might be so high that you might not be getting to the greenhouse gas reduction threshold,” said Anna Krajinska, director at the UK branch of Transport & Environment, a green transport NGO.
In other words, the fuel can be certified as green even if the animal that produced it was raised on illegally cleared Amazonian land.
It remains unclear how widespread illegal deforestation is within the tallow supply chain for biofuels. “It would be important to assess how large this infraction is,” Wouter Dewulf, an aviation economist at the University of Antwerp, said. Biofuels are “the best alternative for the moment”, he added.
“Extremely complex”
DGD is a joint venture between Valero, a major fuel producer, and Darling Ingredients, one of the world’s largest rendering companies. In 2022, Darling Ingredients acquired the Brazilian rendering company FASA Group.
The move gave Darling access to a steady supply of tallow from Brazilian slaughterhouses and rendering plants, but linked its supply chain to deforestation in the Amazon, court documents show.
One of FASA’s subsidiaries, Pacífico Indústria e Comércio, sources tallow from Distriboi, a local slaughterhouse operator involved in 31 lawsuits for land grabbing and illegal deforestation.
The companies involved deny wrongdoing. A spokesperson for Darling Ingredients said the supply chain is “extremely complex” and that their “relationships are typically with the slaughterhouse, several levels removed from cattle ranchers.”
The company added that it was “in the process” of requiring all suppliers to attest that their material is deforestation-free. There is no indication that DGD or Darling were aware of the deforestation at the source.
Darling also denied that its subsidiary Pacífico sources beef residues specifically from Distriboi’s Ji-Paraná slaughterhouse, though it did not respond to a follow-up question about Distriboi's other slaughterhouse in the region.
Lawyers for Distriboi said the matters raised “are already under review, including by higher courts.” Neither Valero nor DGD responded to requests for comment.
For critics, the responses miss the point. The problem is not whether individual companies knew – it is that the system makes it impossible to know.
“Because of the habitat destruction, the assumed CO₂ reduction is not happening,” said Pax Butchart, biofuel campaigner at Biofuelwatch. In Rondônia, that forest is gone.
In the air
The problem might affect your flight.
Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is a catch-all term for aviation fuels derived from non-fossil sources, such as waste oils, agricultural residues, and animal fats. It has become the aviation industry’s primary answer to pressure to decarbonise, precisely because it can be used in existing aircraft engines without modification. For suppliers like DGD, it is a rapidly growing market.
Valero Ireland is a supplier under ReFuelEU, the EU’s strategy to green commercial aviation. Its synthetic aviation fuel – known as SAF – is considered compliant with the programme’s sustainability criteria and is being delivered to European airports.
Last year, DGD shipped 23,000 tonnes of aviation fuel components, valued at roughly €7.9 million, to the Belgian port of Ghent, connected to the NATO pipeline system – a distribution network serving six European commercial airports, including Brussels, and several military bases.
The stakes are high. ReFuelEU required SAF to cover 2% of all airport fuel supply in 2025, rising to 6% by 2030 and 70% by 2050. The more ambitiously Europe scales up its green aviation targets, the more tallow it will need – and the deeper it will go into supply chains like this one.
In 2025 alone, the UK imported €76 million worth of the same aviation fuel from DGD under a sustainability scheme mirroring the EU’s.
And passengers have little way of knowing. Airlines sign contracts with SAF suppliers, but these agreements are rarely made public, meaning the fuel in your tank and the forest in Rondônia may be connected in ways no one is required to disclose.
The law looks away
From 30 December 2026, the EU’s new Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) will require companies to prove their products are not linked to deforestation or forest degradation. It is the bloc’s most ambitious attempt yet to clean up supply chains that have long profited from the destruction of forests like Jaci-Paraná.
The regulation covers a long list of cattle products, including meat, leather, and hides. But beef tallow, the very substance at the heart of this investigation, is not included.
Experts and industry insiders have been raising the alarm about the limits of biofuel certification for years. The lobby group German Biofuel Industry Association (VDB) claims it warned the EU's financial watchdog (the European Court of Auditors) about weaknesses in certification schemes as far back as 2016.
Fraud is not hypothetical. A 2023 investigation by the investigative platform OCCRP found that a Bosnian company sold US soy-based biodiesel to European countries while mislabeling its feedstock as used cooking oil.
Yet, as it stands, the Deforestation Regulation will not change the situation for tallow. Companies importing beef fat into Europe for use in biofuels will face no new obligation to prove it is deforestation-free.
The legal consequences could be significant.
“If the cattle supplying fat were raised on land converted from a high carbon stock area – illegally deforested – the resulting tallow would likely render the biofuel ineligible under strict sustainability criteria, regardless of its emissions calculation,” said Haniyeh Hajatnia, a sustainability researcher at the University of Bath.
In other words, if the traceability were there, the fuel might not qualify at all.
Answering our request for comment, a European Commission spokesperson clarified in an e-mail that under the Regulation on Deforestation-free Products (EUDR, 2023) “public, and private certification systems could be used as risk mitigation tools, provided that those systems are able to supply the information required by the EUDR, in particular traceability via geolocation. Companies, in any case, will still be required to conduct due diligence for products falling into the scope of the regulation – and be held accountable for any potential breach of the regulation.”
Under the RED directive, “food and feed feedstocks are capped at 7% maximum at member state level”, while feedstocks with a significant risk of consuming valuable natural habitats (such as palm oil) “will have to be phased out by 2030,” the official statement reports. However, “biofuels, bioliquids and biomass fuels produced from waste and residues, other than agricultural, aquaculture, fisheries and forestry residues, are required to fulfil only the greenhouse gas emissions saving criteria,” the spokesperson added.
“ReFuelEU Aviation relies on the sustainability criteria developed under the RED directive and the EU laws dealing with deforestation. Additionally, under REFuelEU aviation, food and feed feedstocks are not eligible,” the spokesperson concluded.
This article was published with the support of Journalismfund Europe.