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Solid Wastes in the Meat Packing Industry

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Solid Wastes in the Meat Packing Industry SOLID WASTES IN 'DB MEA" PACKLNG INDUSTRY* GERALD FRANKE Iowa Beef Processors, Inc. Dakota City, Nebraska We in the meat packing industry are abundantly blessed with pollution problems. As the anti-pollution forces have gained popularity, we have been hit on all sides because of our air, water and solid wastes pollution. Water pollution is by far the most popular Issue. In the past few months, I have filled out forms for the State Government, Environmental Protection Agency, Corps of Engineers, and last week, of all people, Department of Internal Revenue, All were concerned with the characteristics of the waste water discharges from our plants. The water pollution problems we face, although serious in dollars expended, are somewhat less serious from a technical standpoint than our solid waste problems because we at least have consultants to turn to. Again in the air pollution problems, mainly those of odor, there are qualified consultants available to help us meet the odor criteria. Our solid waste problems, however, appear to be unique to our industry and as yet very little technical help is available to us. Every beef we slaughter has 50 pounds of stomach contents that we must dispose of. Until recently we had no acceptable manner to handle this material and indeed no one to turn to to offer us a ready-made solution. IBP believes that we have found a method that is ecologically sound and economically feasible. I'd like to pass this along to you today. In addition, we will discuss the other sources of solid waste coming fromthe packing house and our solutions to them. Since IBP is beef oriented many problems that are discussed in this paper will not have an application to pork plants. However, we do have problems in common and I hope that you my be able to glean something from what is presented today. Sources of Waste The main sources of waste in the slaughter plant are listed below. Stock Pens. The live animals are received in concrete stock holding pens that will cover two to four acres. The animals remain in these pens for from 2 to I2 hours prior to slaughter. The droppings from these pens are generally removed daily by flushing with water. These wastes can * Presented at the 25th Annual Reciprocal Meat Conference of the American Meat Science Association, 1972. contribute significantly to the suspended solids loading and the BOD if they are not handled properly prior to discharge to the sewage treatment system, The anirml can carry slgnlflcant amounts of mud and manure in on the hide, particularly in the rainy sea~onsof the year. In our plants we have demenuring and fleshing mrchines which remove these materials and deposit them in the aewera. Kill Floor. On the kill floor the previously mentioned stmach contents will average 50 pounds per thousand pounds of live weight. We design our facilities to handle these materials separately to prevent them from contri- buting to the sewage loading in our plant effluent. In addition, there are product losses that are unavoidable and some that, although they are avoidable, are generally relegated to dumping into the sewer and must be handled in our waste treatment system. An additional source of solids that require special handling include hair, hide trim, ears, face pieces resulting from the hide trimming operation. Other Sources. Other sources of solid waste include the waste from the ln-plant; treatment systems. These include the grease skimmings from skimming basins and air flotation systems and the bottom sludges that settle out in these treatment systems. In addition, there are the containers and packaging materials that are indigenous to most of our operations. Solids Handling and Disposal Methods Pen Wastes. Our stockyards are sloped approximately 1 foot per 100 feet away fromthe plant. At the end of the stockyards we have constructed a long pit with a sloped bottom. The washings from the stockyards empty into this pit. A water level of approximately two feet is maintained to give enough residence time to allow the solids to drop out. We als3 route the demanuring water from the hide fleshing machine and the bottom solids from the air flotation units to this pit. The pit itself is approximately 9 feet wide and is generally six feet deep. Beginning at one end of the pit the flDor has a 6% slope from ground level down to the bottom of the pit. We then have a long 30 to 40 foot horizontal section at the end of the incline. Off to one side at the deep end of the pit, we have a weir sectim. The weir section has a suspended plate to hold floating solids out and removable 2' x 6" boards standing on edge from the bottom up to approximately 2 feet high that will hold back settled solids. The water must flow down underneath the suspended weir which holds back the floating solids and then up over the bottom weir before the clarified water can be discharged out the exit sewer, In order to clean this pit, we remove the overflow boards slowly and allow the water to drain out. This leaves a thoroughly soupy material in the pit for removal. We go into the pit with a front end bader, pick up the Illaterial and drop it into a feed wagon or a honey wagon for field disposal. The cheapest method we have found is to take an old feed wagon with a side discharge, run it aut to a field and discharge it onto the field in windrows. The windrowing has resulted in continual complaints and as a result of this we are exploring an alternative method in our Emporia, Kansas, operat ion. In Emporia, Kansas, we are building a deep pit approximately 6 feet square and 6 feet deep to the side of the manure pit. In this pit we are installing 8 self-priming Gorman Rupp pump that will pick up the incoming water as it comes into the pit, take it up over a Bauer type screen. According to our test the Bauer type screen is quite effective in removing these settleable SOlid8. These solids will then be dropped into a conven- tional manure spreader in much dryer form than what was received in the old gravity settling operation. The weirs in the manure pit will be left in place 80 that if the pump were to fail, the pit would simply fill up and continue to operate in the old manner. We believe this will solve to a great extent the problems that were faced in spreading the wet material in the fields . We explored several methods of dry cleaning the pens and none of them appeared too satisfactory to us. The cost of the equipment and the labor to clean the pens w8s far in excess of the improvements realized with such dry cleanup. We felt the time and dollars expended would be more profitably spent in more fruitful areas of waste reduction in our plant. Stomach Contents The most common method of handllng paunch contents is to flush them down a sewer, and then screen them back out of the sewer in order to haul them itway. The paunch contents are usually deposited in a land fill. According to our Sioux City authorities the only way they have been successful in land filling paunch has been to incorporate it with brush. That has been the only benefit we have found to Dutch Elm disease. According to our lab analysis the juices from the paunch have a B.O.D. of 100,000 mg/l. It is easily seen that this can be a major source of waste strength from a packing house using this method of disposal. After much trial-and-error we have developed an acceptable method of disposing of the punch contents by spreading them on farm fields. We handle this material "dry." That is, we prevent any excess water from entering the system. On the kill floor, our receiving table has a series of bars on the table surface that allow excess water to drain away as the stomach is pulled toward the paunch drop area. The stomach is opened and the stomach contents are allowed to drop into a screw conveyor located at floor level. The stonrach is then washed over an umbrella to further remove the remaining punch contents clinging to the surface of the tripe. This wash water is allowed to go to our air flotaticm system. The paunch contents are screw conveyed to a grinder. This grinder will chew up any twine that the anlmal may have consumed and will also grind up the tripe that are xcasionally dropped and not retrieved by the operations people. One of our biggest complaints before the installation of the grinder came about in one Df 3ur plants when one lady's dainty white poodle came dragging home a 10 pound tripe from our paunch disposal area. The grinder is an old 10" Reitz prebreaker that we had removed from one of our rendering operations. 'i'he grinder has operated a year and has given us virtually no problems and has solved a great many problems in our spreader truck operation. After the grinder the paunch contents drop into a blow tank that has the capability of approximately 2 hours production. Once the blow tank is filled, the paunch contents are blown to an elevated storage tank located outside the plant. We have successfully blown this material for distances of 700 feet at elevation differences of 45 feet. The elevated holding tank has the capacity to hold one full days paunch production.
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