Threat of animal waste looming

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Sweating in the April sun, the City Corporation seems to have forgotten what the June rains might bring. Rotting garbage, stench and the spread of diseases, if the rains arrive on time. Already, there is no nook and corner in the side roads, open places and closed compounds which has not turned into a garbage dump. The worst threat being the tonnes of animal waste generated each day.
 Still, the Corporation has rejected the proposal forwarded by the Kerala State Poultry Development Corporation (KEPCO) to set up a Carcass Utilisation Plant (CUP) in the city. Instead, it will move ahead with its own plans for setting up a ‘rendering plant’ in the slaughter house at Kunnukuzhy which would naturally take its own time to come up. Which also has dimmed the prospects of generation of value-added products like pet feeds under the project.

 KEPCO’s proposal was to set up the CUP plant at a cost of ` 2.5 crore on not more than 2,000 square feet in the slaughter house which would have a capacity of 3.5 tonnes. It had also proposed a rendering plant (RP) attached to it to treat animal waste created in markets and other places where slaughter takes place.
 The proposal had said that the Corporation would collect animal waste and bring it to the slaughter house, while KEPCO would take over from there. Under the project, it would have been possible to treat all the animal waste being produced in the city. Including the waste from illegal slaughter houses.
 The project had received the nod from the State-level committee which was formed to monitor the solid waste management crisis in the State. However, the Corporation is not interested. ‘’Bringing all the waste to Kunnukuzhy slaughter house would destroy our system there. Besides, it is not possible to treat all animal waste from the whole city. So, we have proposed a new project and submitted it to the Suchitwa Misson for approval,’’ said Mayor K Chandrika.
 KEPCO had initially submitted the proposal to the Centre, but finding it not feasible (since it requires more than the 700 kg animal waste it daily treats), sought the partnership of the Corporation to do it. ‘’It is not the mere treatment of waste. Our project had considered turning the byproducts into value-added products. Treating the waste generated in our compound is not a problem for us since we have two mega biogas plants running. Had the project seen light, a major problem faced by the city would have been dealt with,’’ said V Sunilkumar, Managing Director of KEPCO.
 Now that the Corporation has decided to take its own path, it is almost sure that the CUP would not come up and animal waste is here to stay and decay. The easy solution would be to turn veggies at the earliest, at least till the rains get over.