Can you imagine just a simple power cut or a delayed handoff could do a lot of damaged in supply chains?
And this is not a rare mishap, especially for a country like India that runs the world’s largest dairy herd and one of its largest poultry industries on a supply chain.
Why Waste Matters
It must be kept in mind that India’s livestock sector isn’t just a side note to agriculture.
Livestock has become an increasingly important part of India’s agricultural economy, contributing 30.23% of the agricultural gross value added in 2022-23, compared with 24.38% a decade earlier. The dairy sector alone provides a livelihood to more than eight crore farmers across the country.
At the global level, nearly 14% of meat and other animal products are lost between the farm and retail stages. Similar challenges are observed in India’s livestock supply chain, particularly when veterinary products and feed are not stored or transported properly. For example, vaccines exposed to unsuitable temperatures may lose their effectiveness, while feed supplements can deteriorate if their packaging is damaged or allows moisture to enter. These losses directly affect farmers through lower productivity, higher replacement costs, and reduced confidence in the products they rely on.
Where Waste Actually Happens
When veterinary logistics professionals are asked where product losses occur, the answer is rarely limited to a single cause. Instead, losses typically result from a series of small issues that accumulate throughout the supply chain.
- Cold chain failures: Many rural storage and distribution facilities experience unreliable electricity, making it difficult to maintain the recommended storage temperature for temperature-sensitive veterinary products. Even a few hours outside the required temperature range can reduce the effectiveness of biological products such as vaccines. While human immunization programs often include documented vaccine wastage allowances to account for unavoidable cold chain disruptions, veterinary supply chains generally have fewer systems in place to monitor and record such losses, making the true extent of wastage difficult to measure.
- Packaging waste: Used vaccine vials, feed sachets, blister packs, and other single-use plastic containers often accumulate at rural distribution centres and farms, where formal collection and recycling systems are limited or unavailable. As a result, much of this packaging is either discarded improperly or left unmanaged.
- Fragmented last-mile distribution: Veterinary products typically pass through several intermediaries including manufacturers, distributors, cooperatives, retailers, and finally farmers. With multiple transfers along the supply chain, responsibility for product damage or losses is often unclear, reducing accountability and limiting efforts to prevent wastage.
- Feed spoilage during storage: India produces more than 27 million tonnes of poultry feed annually. Even a small percentage of spoilage caused by excess moisture, pest infestation, or inadequate storage conditions can result in substantial losses, affecting both feed quality and overall production costs.
India’s Biggest Challenges
Scale is India’s advantage and its complication in equal measure.
The country produces over 239 million tonnes of milk a year which is nearly a quarter of the world’s supply and ranks second globally in egg production at over 138 billion eggs annually. Moving veterinary inputs to match that scale means reaching poultry clusters in Andhra Pradesh, dairy belts in Uttar Pradesh and fisheries operations along both coasts, often through infrastructure that wasn’t designed for temperature-controlled, time-sensitive cargo.
Much of this movement still depends on infrastructure that was not originally designed for temperature-sensitive or time-critical biological and feed-based products.
At the same time, increasing emphasis on extended producer responsibility (EPR) for plastic packaging is adding another layer of pressure on manufacturers. As a result, the industry is now dealing with two parallel waste challenges which are biological and feed materials that degrade when conditions fail, and plastic packaging that persists in the environment long after use.
Innovative Ways Companies Are Reducing Waste
What’s becoming popular is not radical innovation but effective engineering.
Many companies are deploying solar-powered cold storage systems at rural distribution points to reduce dependence on unstable grid electricity and protect temperature-sensitive products during outages. In parallel, real-time temperature monitoring during transport is being used to detect cold-chain deviations early, allowing corrective action before products are fully compromised. Demand forecasting tools are also being adopted to better align production with actual field requirements, reducing the risk of overproduction, especially for biologics with limited shelf life.
On the packaging side, there is a gradual shift toward mono-material and biodegradable alternatives. These designs are easier to process and dispose of compared to multi-layer plastics, which are often unsuitable for rural recycling systems. The aim is to reduce end-of-life complexity and minimize the accumulation of packaging waste in areas with limited waste management infrastructure.
Sustainability and the Circular Economy
India’s National Livestock Mission and the government’s Traceability Platform for Livestock Products, launched in October 2024, signal a clear shift in policy direction. The focus is moving toward supply chains that can be monitored from end to end, along with systems designed to prevent materials from simply entering landfill after use.
Within this framework, circularity is gaining importance. It involves rethinking waste as a resource, using organic and industrial by-products such as husks, whey, and agricultural residues as inputs for new materials, including those used in animal health and feed systems. In effect, what was once a linear flow of production and disposal is gradually being restructured into a loop where value is recovered and reused at multiple stages.
Future Outlook
The next five years will likely reward companies that treat waste reduction as a design problem, not a logistics afterthought. Building products and packaging that assume rural, power-inconsistent, multi-handoff conditions from day one, rather than retrofitting fixes after losses show up on a balance sheet.
How TerraPHA Supports Sustainable Veterinary & Animal Husbandry Supply Chains
TerraPHA Biotech approaches this challenge from the material side of the equation. As one of India’s early commercial biopolymer companies, TerraPHA is based on non-GMO microbial systems to convert renewable and waste-derived carbon sources into biodegradable materials which is an approach that sidesteps the plastic residue problem baked into so much veterinary and animal husbandry packaging.
The manufacturing follows a low-impact, zero-waste-oriented process and its feedstock flexibility means it isn’t locked into a single agricultural input, which matters in a country where supply resilience varies by season and region. Within animal husbandry specifically, TerraPHA’s work centers on cleaner, safer production systems that reduce chemical dependency and ecological footprint while its aquaculture and fisheries applications focus on antibiotic-free, water-quality-conscious alternatives for a sector under mounting environmental pressure.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is waste so common in veterinary supply chains?
Veterinary products are transported via some of the most fragmented last-mile systems in India’s agricultural sector including manufacturing facilities located in urban centers to remote locations such as dairy farms and poultry centers. Temperature-sensitive biologics, vaccines, and formulations spoil easily without cold-chain protection, while plastic packaging contributes to an additional waste management challenge that is poorly managed at best.
How can biotechnology reduce livestock supply chain waste?
Biotechnology is an approach to address waste not just in logistics but also at the level of materials themselves. Packaging and dispensers made from bio-based resources that are capable of biodegrading limit the amount of plastic residue generated by veterinary products, and precision fermentation and non-GMO microorganisms could be used to create both feedstock and packing material from biomass and waste streams.
Why is sustainable packaging important for veterinary products?
The veterinary and animal husbandry supply chains are major sources of waste plastic that comes from vials, blister packaging, feed pouches, cold chain packaging, etc. Most of this is done in rural areas where there are no facilities for recycling. The use of biodegradable and mono-material packaging not only reduces waste but also brings down the environmental footprint on agriculture and waterways.
How does India benefit from circular animal husbandry practices?
India’s livestock sector supports over eight crore dairy farmers and contributes roughly 30% of agricultural GVA, so even modest efficiency gains carry an outsized economic impact. The principles of circularity such as recycling of waste from agriculture and industries for use as feed or packing material and minimizing cold chain losses and plastic footprint benefit farmers and align with India’s climate goals.
