Thiruvananthapuram Corporation faces a stinking issue

No solution yet to treating meat waste from hotels, abattoirs

The city corporation has kicked off an ambitious drive to clean up the city in a few weeks by setting up waste-collection kiosks and tying up with a private company to covert it all into manure, but a huge problem area still persists for which a solution is nowhere in sight.

The local body is still clueless as to what exactly to do with the meat waste from hotels and small slaughterhouses that dot the city.

Corporation health officials say the kiosks can handle such waste in small quantities from households but things will get out of hand in wards where there is a concentration of hotels and slaughterhouses.

Alternative mechanism

“The quantity of meat waste from the relatively bigger hotels is huge and the kiosks cannot handle that much. An alternative mechanism has been in the planning for long but a permanent solution is still elusive,” said a health official.

In areas where the corporation has set up biogas plants, such as in Palayam market, the meat waste from the locality is deposited in these plants, but even these have limitations.

“The meat waste has to be properly sorted before it can be dumped in biogas plants, especially if the plant is smaller. Oily and fatty materials will cause a film to form on top which can affect the plant’s working,” said the official.

Mini-plants

Meat shops are supposed to have mini-biogas plants or other waste treatment mechanism attached to the shop.

A few years’ back, the corporation had decided not to renew the licence of shops which do not have this facility but only a few shops have made such arrangements even now.

The number of illegal slaughterhouses has also compounded the problem. Officials say that even in shops where such facilities are available, it is only for namesake and not according to specifications.

“The most preferred method to dispose of meat waste is to bury it. Now we hear that there are agents who collect waste for a fee and dump it at different parts of the city at night. There are also arrangements by which such waste is collected in trucks and taken to Tamil Nadu. The bones are in demand in the sugar industry,” says the official.