Pollutants such as slaughterhouse and wet market waste have long been overlooked by society. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, three billion and nineteen million cattle were eaten worldwide in 2018, reflecting the large number and diverse range of biowastes created. Slaughterhouse biowastes represent a considerable volume of biohazards, posing a severe danger of pollution to the environment, disease outbreaks, and unsafe food safety.

What Happens to the Wastes From Slaughterhouses and Wet Markets?

In some regions of the world, unregulated dumping of biowastes still occurs, but mainly the biowastes are collected, transported, and treated by the municipal sanitation department or the waste management agencies. The slaughterhouse waste is separated into specified types of biowastes, such as food waste, fat, hair, bones, blood, and meat from slaughterhouses. 

The wet market waste is separated into organic wastes consisting of wet food, vegetable, animal, and fish, as well as paper and plastic, as well as inorganic wastes consisting of metals and glass. These wastes are then transported to treatment plants for bioenergy production, composting, anaerobic digestion, and landfill. To help reduce the volume of waste, some businesses cut down the volume of wastes and reuse some of the food wastes as fertilizers in agriculture, feed for animals, or compost.

Animal hides, bones, and meat scraps in developing countries are rarely treated according to proper waste management methods. These wastes are collected and dumped at landfills, spread on fields, dried and burned, stored in open piles and containers, or stored in the businesses themselves.

How Does This Affect the Environment?

Biowastes are essential contributors to the environment, helping to decompose organic wastes, contributing to nutrient cycles, and serving as natural fertilizers. However, improper handling of slaughterhouse wastes can cause negative consequences for the environment. The contamination of the environment with biowastes, particularly slaughterhouse wastes, can cause several diseases in humans and animals. 

The high concentration of pathogens, such as viruses, bacteria, and parasites, in the biowastes from slaughterhouses can cause disease, including diarrhea, respiratory infections, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. Malnutrition, which may be caused by insufficient protein, can produce ammonia and volatile gases, toxic chemicals, and aerosols that can cause eye and lung irritation, headaches, and nausea.

What Approaches are Being Used to Manage Waste?

A wide variety of methods can be used to manage biowastes. These approaches include composting, anaerobic digestion, landfill, incineration, and recycling.

Some methods of biowaste management are more effective than others. For example, composting is preferable to landfills; it uses alternate methods and processes to find the best ways to manage biowastes. Landfill uses less oxygen, which can speed up the decomposition of wastes and reduce the formation of methane and leachate. However, composting takes more time and effort and produces an inferior product. Composting is the most sustainable and environmentally friendly biowaste management method.

Anaerobic digestion is another approach that is used to treat biowaste. An anaerobic digester is a device that can use naturally occurring anaerobic bacteria to break down biowastes in the absence of oxygen. The anaerobic digester converts organic substances in biowastes into biogas, which is a mixture of methane, carbon dioxide, and other gases, as well as byproducts such as fertilizer.

Another aged but practical approach to managing biowaste is to recycle the unused biowastes and reuse them for multiple purposes. For example, the leftovers from slaughterhouses and wet markets can be reused in other food production processes, such as fish farms and pig farms, or recycled as fuel. Meat slop and other dry biowastes can be used as fuel, while wet wastes can be reused in some other ways, such as cattle feed and fertilizer. However, most slaughterhouses and wet markets have not widely adopted waste recycling due to the high costs and massive technical difficulty.

Conclusion

Biowastes are an unavoidable byproduct of food production. They are composed of slaughterhouse and wet market waste, which are composed mainly of food waste and inorganic waste. To minimize the negative impacts of biowastes, proper and effective management is required. The waste should be separated into organic and inorganic wastes, transported to treatment plants, and disposed of properly.

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