Development Aspects Impressum Editors

Implementation in the chicken-processing company

1. 
   Situation at project start
   

At this production site, live chickens are delivered by trucks. They are processed on site producing either whole chicken or chicken parts ready for delivery to wholesal- ers. In addition to the final product, the process also produces wastes (feathers, blood, skin, fat and bones) which are transformed on site. The blood and feath- ers are collected at the initial stage of the processing and transformed into flour. The other wastes are generated further down the line and are collected with the processing wastewater. A simple liquid/solid separator allows the processing of the solids into another type of flour and the remaining liquids are then treated through a series of oxidation ponds. Both types of flour are sold as animal feed for other agro-food industries in the vicinity. Because of the poor solid/liquid separation and the under-dimensioning of the ponds, the effluents of the company regularly

largely exceeded national guidelines and meant that heavy fines had to be settled monthly.

2. Project implementation and results

The introduction of the management tools of TEST at this site allowed the identifi- cation of the processing steps inducing environmental degradation and economic losses. Low-cost cleaner production measures were immediately implemented and adopted with over 93 per cent of the recommendations now in place, resulting in a reduction of water use by 21 per cent or about 450 m³ per day.
One of the main investment recommendations was the remodelling of the effluent treatment, and an international expert was recruited to develop a fully- fledged investment proposal together with the project implementation team of the company. As a result, the oxidation ponds have been totally remodelled ac- cording to the best available practices and, consequently, the company’s effluents are now well within the national guidelines, representing a saving of more than US$2,160 monthly. In fact, biochemical oxygen demand at the release point has been reduced by 55 per cent following the implementation of the cleaner produc- tion measures and the improved wastewater treatment ponds (see figure 3a and b).




Figure 3a: Effluent release: before Figure 3b: Effluent release: after

3.