Environmental impacts on waste and water disposal from abbatoirs and poultry processing units in Weligama area,

Abstract

Selling of Mas ,:s..one of the popular businesses among the Muslim community in the Weligama area.Therefcre, the C)~jective of the present study was to collect baseline data 011 the waste and waterdisp. ..:•.i methods and sanitary measures in abattoirs and poultry farms in the are i. Selected abattoirsand poultry farms were visited to monitor the prevailing conditions and advice abattoirs and poultryfarmers how to improve the standards in their working places. The results of this study revealed thatail the abattoirs possess experience but little skill, knowledge and technology. All the visited abattoirsare situated close to residential areas, especially close to water bodies such as wells and streams. Thereason is that the abattoirs need lot of water for cieaning and other purposes. Animals were killed 0'1the floor just afrer cleaning with water. Approximately 100-\50 kg meat was processed daily. Thecarcass recovery percentage was 50%; thereby waste generated was also 50% of the Iive weight ofthe animal. Approximately half of the waste contained bones, buried and used as fertilizer at a latterstage. Inedible parts of the digestive track and undigested material also buried, however, very close tothe proximity of residential areas. The amount of water used was around 80-\ 00 I/day but no properway of disposing polluted water as it directly gees to drams, streams and opened wells etc. It was alsoobserved 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% whilethe amount of waste generated was 25-30% of the live weight of a bird. Average waste materialgenerated from a processing unit was around 75 kg/day. The offal's were properly disposed due tocollection by the urban council for COP1PCStmaking. It prevents environmental pollution and health hazards due to accumulation of offal and other wastes. Some processors were not involved in aboveprogramme and buried their wastes but complained that they do not have enough area for wastedisposal.lt 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 waterpollution as well. Therefore, it is utmost important to educate the abattoirs for proper waste and watermanagement techn iques in order to min im ize the environmenta I hazards.