Fishy business. The Social Impact of SST.pdf - Act Now!

some of that we use in our cafeteria, and if theres anything left over, any fish not suitable foreating that would go into the fish meal. We do about 50 tonnes of fish meal a week, that goes toAustralia, exported, and yes, we do sell some to a manufacturer in Lae, and another is the EBCbuy it to use themselves, and some to the local users, at discounted prices, for local use here, butits high protein and needs to be blended down with other stuff to be used.”Paul: “What about the wastes?”IB: “We implemented exactly the same procedures that are used anywhere else, and we setthose guidelines ourselves, because there were no established standards that were familiar withas would be UPA American style, for the factory, so we put in two water treatment plants, weput in a sanitary water treatment plant, and that handles all the domestic waste, so we operatethe only sewage treatment plant in wewak, and so all the waste is filtered through that plant,that’s a typical plant that a small town would utilize. Its aerobic and its batch-type plant—thenthe sludge from that--its an air- bacteria with airation..and its ummm, its.. We have an 800metre effluent pipeline that discharges the treated effluent from the sanitation and the processplant wastes, all the wash down water from the factory, so that’s dissolved there with cateronicpollument (?) and aeration. And so we float the sludge to the top, and the sludge gets raked off,and the sludge from the sanitary plant is taken off to a storage tank and that is pumped to avessel and that is dumped past Moim point and about 6 km past Moim point… Well the odoursthat I believe that people object about are the odors coming from the watse water, mainly theprocessing plant, because the sanitary plant is contained. Weve had out teething problems,training problems, learning ourselves problems, and weve made some substantialimprovem,ents on that. And in fact we had some people here yesterday from local levelgovernment and I think they were pretty much in agreement too that we have things a lot betterthan they have been in the p[asty from time to time…we draw the odors from the sludgecollection tank along with the fish meal plant, and along with the fish cookers here when theyreevacuated, and we draw that through the bio filter and that filters it from bacteria, and its prettyeffective in neutralizing the odor, and if you walk around you can smell how effective it is, ifyou compare it with the smells inside. We’ve had our issues there of course…but we’re the firsttuna factory in existence to operate with a bio filter. Well the bio filter always has been good,we’ve had some problems with the sludge tank venting system. That’s been a source of odorsfrom time to time and weve tried to resolve these issues and weve learned a few things in theprocess. Like I said this is the first time I’ve ever worked with one [a bio filter]. And, um, it’snot new technology, it’s been used in Europe quite a lot, and particularly in abattoirs, and wesaw it was really effective so we decided to bring the technology here. And it has, you’ll walkaround and if the fish meal plant was emitting out to the community without the bio filter you’dsmell it. [laughter]. It has made a big difference, it does a good job. But any odor we do havenow I believe comes from our processed water treatment and I think we’ve made a lot ofimprovements on that.”P: “What’s you biggest achievement so far?”IB: “Achievement? Getting to 100 tonnes a day. We started with 2 tonnes, and we built upgradually…we got up to 70 fairly quickly, but its taken quite a bit to get the last 30-odd tonness,and that’s people getting up to speed, we use industry standard cleaning standards used all overthe world we know that because the peoploe involved in this factory have had experience allover, Ive had experience all over the world, so we the standards we implemented are common,and its just people learning,….it’s a repetitious job, its not a real difficult job, but I don’t want tomake light of it, to do it well properly doesn’t require a lot of speed, it requires technique. Sobeing able to maintain the quality level and get the troop sup to clean fish for people who’ve90