European Livestock Skin as Collagen Feedstocks: Technical Potential and Bioprocess Prioritisation

Valorisation of animal-processing co-products through advanced bioprocesses can generate collagen hydrolysates and bioactive peptides, but the scale and accessibility of collagen-bearing feedstocks remain poorly quantified across Europe. This study estimated skin-derived collagen potential across the EU-27 from harmonised Eurostat slaughterhouse data for bovines, pigs, sheep, goats and chickens (2010–2025), using species-specific dressing and skin fractions, low/base/high recovery scenarios, country fixed-effects models, compositional analysis and Monte Carlo uncertainty propagation. Across species-specific available observations in 2025, 40.724 million tonnes of carcass production corresponded to an estimate base-case technical collagen potential of 729.5 kt. A bioprocess-oriented opportunity matrix showed that chicken combined the largest scale (365.1 kt) with high collagen intensity (30.0 kg/t carcass) and a significant positive temporal trend, whereas sheep had the highest intensity (36.2 kg/t) but much smaller scale. The 24-country complete ruminant subset contained 882.6 kt of directly separable hide/skin feedstock and 132.4 kt of collagen potential; France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Ireland accounted for 66.3% of this resource. These estimates represent technical potential under the stated feedstock-capture and recovery assumptions, not economically available collagen resources or realised collagen production, peptide yield or biological activity.