Functions satisfying a defective renewal equation arise commonly in applied probability models. Usually these functions don't admit a explicit expression. In this work we consider to approximate them by means of a gamma-type operator given in terms of the Laplace transform of the initial function. We investigate which conditions on the initial parameters of the renewal equation give optimal order of uniform convergence in the approximation. We apply our results to ruin probability in the classical risk model, paying special attention to mixtures of gamma claim amounts.