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Environmental impacts on waste and water disposal from abbatoirs and poultry processing units in Weligama area.
By Dewwanthi Karunarathna | January 18, 2008
Selling of Meat is one of the popular businesses among the Muslim community in the Weligama area. Therefore, the objective of the present study was to collect baseline data on the waste and water disposal methods and sanitary measures in abattoirs and poultry farms in the area. Selected abattoirs and poultry farms were visited to monitor the prevailing conditions and advice abattoirs and poultry farmers how to improve the standards in their working places. The results of this study revealed that all the abattoirs possess experience but little skill, knowledge and technology. All the visited abattoirs are situated close to residential areas, especially close to water bodies such as wells and streams. The reason is that the abattoirs need lot of water for cleaning and other purposes. Animals were killed on the floor just after cleaning with water. Approximately 100-150 kg meat was processed daily. The carcass recovery percentage was 50%; thereby waste generated was also 50% of the live weight of the animal. Approximately half of the waste contained bones, buried and used as fertilizer at a latter stage. Inedible parts of the digestive track and undigested material also buried, however, very close to the proximity of residential areas. The amount of water used was around 80-100 l/day but no proper way of disposing polluted water as it directly goes to drains, streams and opened wells etc. It was also observed that all the poultry cages and processing units were located very close to residential areas. Around 300 kg of poultry meat was produced daily. The carcass recovery was around 70-75% while the amount of waste generated was 25-30% of the live weight of a bird. Average waste material generated from a processing unit was around 75 kg/day. The offals were properly disposed due to collection by the urban council for compost making. It prevents environmental pollution and health hazards due to accumulation of offal and other wastes. Some processors were not involved in above programme and buried their wastes but complained that they do not have enough area for waste disposal.It is concluded that poultry processing involve with proper waste disposal methods. However, abattoirs use very unhygienic methods for waste disposal while no attention was focused on water pollution as well. Therefore, it is utmost important to educate the abattoirs for proper waste and water management techniques in order to minimize the environmental hazards.
N D C Sirisena, P A B S Baduwasam, R A U J Marapana and T Seresinghe
Department of Animal Science, University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka
Topics: Pollution control, symposium 2006 | No Comments »