Costly new mad-cow rules a 'fiasco,' slaughterhouses complain
Margaret Munro, CanWest News Service
Published: Monday, July 09, 2007
The rendering company West Coast Reduction has begun a pick-up service in Alberta, Saskatchewan and southern B.C. for specified risk materials (SRM) that must now be diverted out of slaughterhouses for disposal. The company's trucks will haul the segregated tissues to its plants in Saskatoon and Calgary for rendering. It will be reduced to tallow, which will be purified and sold for use in everything from cosmetics to industrial lubricants, says Barry Glotman, president of West Coast Reduction. The rest of the SRM will be compressed, "dewatered" and turned into meat and bone meal, which has the consistency of fine sand.
The meal will be hauled to Coronation, a small town in east-central Alberta, which is about to become SRM capital of Canada, says John Rush, district manager of Waste Services (CA) Inc., which runs the landfill where it is to be buried.
Rush says the plan is to mix the SRM meat and bone meal with contaminated soil from the oil industry, using a dedicated $600,000 bulldozer. The mixture will be buried in a seven-metre-deep clay-lined "cell" about the size of three football fields. Any liquid that runs out of the landfill will then be collected and pumped 1,500 metres underground. With 80 per cent of Canada's cattle in western Canada, it is expected the bulk of the country's SRM will end up in the Coronation landfill for the next few years until incineration facilities come online to burn it.
Jim Long, vice-president of Rothsay, a rendering company that handles animal waste from Newfoundland to Winnipeg, says most of the SRM in eastern Canada is to be collected by dedicated trucks and rendered into dry meal before heading to the landfills.
Meat and bone meal from beef slaughter waste containing SRM material used to be worth about $200 a tonne and was used in animal feed and fertilizers. Now it will cost about $75 a tonne to get rid of the stuff, says Dennis Laycraft of the Canadian Cattleman's Association.
The costs will eventually trickle back down to farmers and consumers, says Glotman.